


Bye Bye Blackbird

by Mad_Max



Series: All Delighted People [3]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bad Italian, Bittersweet Ending, Canon Era, Corruption, Credence Barebone Deserves Better, Credence Barebone Gets a Hug, Credence Barebone Learning Magic, Credence Barebone Needs a Hug, Government Agencies, Government Conspiracy, M/M, MACUSA | Magical Congress of the United States of America, Obscurial Credence Barebone, Original Percival Graves is Bad at Feelings, Percival Graves is a Jerk, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Sexism, Power Dynamics, Power Imbalance, Rough Kissing, Rough Sex, Workaholic Original Percival Graves, Xenophobia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-01-05 21:11:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21215138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Max/pseuds/Mad_Max
Summary: Percival Graves was happy with his job. Now, he has to deal with crisis and scandal, as one of his employees has turned up old paperwork and found an unregistered wizard living in the grasp of one of the most openly anti-wizard organisations to be in operation this side of the Atlantic since the 1600's.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I like awful!Percival Graves and I hope you will too.

PERCIVAL READS the report over a second cup of coffee and a pretzel from the floating pretzel-cart downstairs, sans mustard, sans cream, grimacing.

It’s a mess, a veritable flaming wreckage of an oversight. He scans the first paragraph and sits back and swallows. _Unregistered wizard - _his temple throbs - _past age of majority - _he could strangle them all_ \- of unknown heritage - _living in that den ofno-maj wizard-haters, overlooked and well forgotten by the time his name had come up on a crumpled sheet of paper stashed away before the war by some clerk long since retired. It’s enough to make him consider a thorough purge of the basement staff. Cleanse the damn department by fire. But that, as Seraphina would be only too pleased to inform him, is neither his bureau nor his business.

“Mancini!”

Regardless whose concern it ought to be, Percival thinks, it’s a terrific embarassment for wizarding government. A blasted oversight. Makes them all look like a bunch of two-knut cartoons. Magical birth unregistered because the forms had fallen down the back of an old cabinet. Discovered by an elf, of all creatures, on the tail end of a dusting charm. Had they all forgotten how to clean for a decade? He eyes his own desk with a sudden burst of suspicion. It might have been polished over the weekend. He should put a note in. And then he would like to go down himself and get a look-in firsthand at what passes for paperwork filing these days.

“What?” Mancini calls back from over the polished tips of his shoes in the group office beyond Percival’s open door.He had been filing his nails and does not rise, the little upstart.

“More coffee,” Percival barks. “And get a bird out to Carlorosi at the _Ghost_. I want to know how much they have on this and what they’re planning on putting in the papers. Tell her to hold the press until it’s settled, will you?”

“Yeah, yeah - _pronto._”

“Immediately.”

“_Subito_,” Mancini sighs. Percival watches the curl fall out of his black hair just so, his languid stretching as he slides off the edge of his chair and drops the nail file into a little cup on his desk. “You’re a real son-of-a-bitch, you know that?”

“She likes you,” says Percival, shrugging indifferently. He feels his calm returning to him in drops. At least their banter has not changed. He can count on Mancini to be insubordinate, full of himself, lazy. He twirls a finger through his cold coffee until the temperature returns to just near scalding. “You’re the only one she’ll put a hold on for. And you’re the only one in this office who speaks that jinxed peasant dialect.”

“And you are a bastard, you can forget about your ‘another coffee’,” Mancini shouts gleefully over his shoulder, his hand on the door. He calls his cloak (too handsome, rich bottle green, too well-cut, for a junior officer, Percival thinks) with a wave of his hand. “_Porco dio che spettacolo_! I had a morning planned! Who is this little shit anyway that everybody is going crazy about?” 

“None of your business,” says Percival, as the department door slams flush into its frame.

The problem with it all, of course, is that Percival couldn’t begin to explain even to himself who the young man is or where he’s come from. There is no register of a birth. The autoscribe forms list only his “arrival” in New York City in late January of 1901. No permits had been filed on his behalf, nor had he “arrived” in the presence of any other magical persons. Percival jots this down in his notebook, in pen and ink as opposed to the pencil that is customary in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.

It is possible, he thinks, that the child had immigrated in the company of its non-magical parents and that they, when they became aware of the nature of its gift, had simply abandoned it. Percival sits back in his chair and passes a hand over his jaw, his left ear. He tries to imagine the scenario and finds that he likes it. 

It ties in neatly. He likes neatly. Not only possible, but probable. This is the kind of scientific explanation he enjoys. Logical, backed by hard numbers and perfectly legal, if inconvenient. No-majs have been flooding in by the millions for decades. Often with children, sometimes with magical children who require tracking down for careful removal from their non-magical families so as to avoid unwanted friction with the no-maj community. _Extraction _is the _terminus officialis._

He runs a quick mental tally: there had been four problem extractions in ’22 with Armenians, a Syrian father who turned out to be a squib and raised quite a ruckus, a hell of a lot of paperwork just at the end of the jinxed no-maj war for a slough of Poles, and a headache with Moore, senior editor of the _Ghost_, on his so-called _right to report_. Then in ’23 there were the two Sicilians who had somehow managed to reject their memory charms and the big splash in the no-maj newspapers as a reporter had falsely connected these cases with another set of missing Sicilian children from the grimy alleys of some wretched tenement block. That one had been a full-blown migraine to square, and in the end, they’d had to deport the Sicilians back to Italy alongside their magical offspring to avoid a backlash from their own about the separation. What was the no-maj turn of phrase there? ‘I wash my hands of the matter’. Neat. Percival liked that one too. 

This young man, labelled “Anonymous Minor” on his crumpled arrival document, must have passed through a no-maj port, for there was no record of him elsewhere. Another tick in another box in favour of immigration with non-magical guardians. Abandonments were not so uncommon, and were generally preferable to the nasty job of retrieving magical children from no-maj asylums. Frowning, Percival tugs another sheet from the docket and scans it. Adoption Certificate. 1905. Goldstein’s notes on the following page read: _missing information, false DOB, possibly forged_. 

Beneath that is the medi-brief. He yanks it out and flattens it with the palm of his hand. It informs him in dry medical shorthand of its patient’s good vitals and vitamin levels, a poorly healed fracture in the right wrist, scarring on the palms of both hands, and blah blah. He rubs his temple with the pad of his thumb, small circles. So, the kid’s scrawny for his age and a little banged up. Not the most breathtaking broomstick on the block, Percival thinks. But then, hardly the fault of - he scans the paperwork - Credence Barebone, 23, of Pike Street.

Percival sighs. What he really needs is stronger than coffee, something to get him through this mess of a docket. He sweeps the papers back into their folio and ties it shut again, pushes it into the far corner of his desk, and drops his head into his hands. This is exactly the kind of crisis they were all hoping to avoid just now, with Seraphina’s re-election on the line and alongside hers, his own future as head of this department.

No time to sit around feeling sorry for himself, however. They’ll have to run full background checks on the entire organisation, the wizard-haters club or whatever they’re called. There will have to be official statements made up for the _Ghost _and a fake official report to obscure the confidential information they’re still gathering. All the intel they lack. His head feels like it’s been dented. He doesn’t even want to begin to contemplate the implications that a wizard could exist entirely undetected in their city, at times blocks away from this very building, for decades. 

The worst of it is that he can remember himself quite clearly, two years prior, snapping at Goldstein to leave the jinxed fools alone. Unimportant, he’d said. Beneath our notice. A non-threat. 

Should he be pleased that she disobeyed him? Without her surveillance notes and knack for cracking through no-maj records, they’d never have located this young man, Credence Barebone, on their own. On the other hand, Percival thinks, it would not have been such a tremendous loss for the wizarding community. He can take some comfort in this, to think that perhaps the fault is not entirely theirs. Per the docket on his desk, Barebone has displayed very little magical talent and even less interest in exploring it. _SUBJECT begs not to be forced to hold a wand_, read the notes from last night. _Further testing rendered nil, see ANALYSIS p. 6._

“If the kid’s a squib,” Percival muses, “he’s better off obliviated and sent on his merry way.” 

Cheered by this thought, he takes the docket and his unfinished pretzel in hand and sets off for the elevators. 

“Thoughts?” says Seraphina as soon as the car has begun its descent.

They share a long look.

“Pending,” Percival replies, with a nod at the attendant.

The corridor they step into is long and dimly lit by a string of ornamental glass lampshades studded along the walls, a straight-shot of black subway tile. Designed by a German in ’09, he remembers suddenly, then this had been shortly before the war, when you could still talk about those things in educated company. 

“The greatest concern we have, as of now,” Seraphina begins, breaking his architectural musing, “is to establish the heritage of this boy and work out how he’s gone undetected for so long.” 

That digs. He ignores her side-swept glance. Her shoes make an inordinate amount of clack on the tile. Charmed, he thinks. The headache has spread into his eye socket, pinches. Seraphina always did enjoy an entrance, likes to see the secretaries jumping back to work as she glides by. 

“I’m concerned about this, Percival.” 

There is space behind this sentence, an in-built pause, as they both descend a small staircase and continue round the corridor. This, he realises, is something he appreciates very much about Seraphina. She knows that he wants to choose his words carefully, that he is at his most considerate when they disagree. He stops short and rubs his eye. 

“To be honest with you, I think we’re about to find that he’s not very interesting after all.” 

“Oh?”

“No,” says Percival. “Do you mind if I vape?” 

“If you must.” 

“Well,” says Percival tightly around the end of a thin silver tube withdrawn from his breast pocket. He tests it with a brief puff and expels alittle brown cloud of coffee-flavoured smoke from between his teeth. “It’s like this,” he says, and they begin to walk again, trailed by rings of smoke. “What’re the odds we’ve never picked up on him before? Sure, I never prioritised them, but we’ve had tabs on those scourer cartoons for a while now. He’s close enough, he’d have ticked off the scensors out in front of City Hall at some point - ”

“You think he’s a squib?” 

“Or as close to it.” 

“Or as close to it,” Seraphina echoes. 

He watches this thought sink beneath the inscrutable frown that he has come to recognise as a hallmark of Madame President, rather than of his long-time colleague, Seraphina Picquery. They stop abruptly at a fork in the corridor where the walls seem to draw in over their heads. The doors here are thick, curse-proof, have no windows, only peepholes. Seraphina is still frowning. 

At length, she says, “You should put that thing away, Percival.” 

“I like to vape while I think.” 

“I don’t think he’ll understand it. They smoke those paper things. He wouldn’t know what you were doing.” 

“He’ll figure it out,” says Percival, puffing a bit harder. 

Not for the first time today, he finds himself battling the crush of rage in his throat. Deep annoyance at the fuss they’ve all thrown up around this kid. This scourer brat, he thinks. There was a time they’d have shipped him off to Azkaban via the Brits and had done with it, ta ta, etc etc. A helluva lot less paperwork than the mountains they’re looking at now. He takes a calming whiff of brown smoke from his vape-o. 

“What’s he like?” 

“Quiet,” says Seraphina. Now that they have a moment, he notices she’s managed to change from her yesterday-robes despite the all-nighter and replaced them with something black and silk and angular, giving her the appearance of the exclamation mark on a newspaper headline. Bold-type. She licks her lips, an oddly personal mannerism that he tacks on to his prior assessment of her as “overtaxed”. 

“He’s very quiet,” she repeats. “And frightened.” 

“Of us?”

“Of everyone.” 

The door melts away at her touch. 

“Go in and see for yourself. I want your full report in my office by noon.” 

Mancini storms back into the office just as Percival is finishing his lunch. 

“Nobody tells me anything in this jinx-ed place!”

“You’re tracking mud on the carpet,” notes Percival without looking up. 

“I go all the way uptown to Carlorosi - ” 

He checks his wristwatch. It’s just after noon. Time for a well-earned post-lunch vape-o. 

“Do you know what she tells me?” 

Coffee or vanilla? He reaches into his pocket as Mancini paces, a blur of green cloak and brown shoes off the edge of his desk. Blasted stylish combination. Too similar to the outfit he’d planned for Sport-suit Saturday, Percival thinks, with no trace amount of annoyance. He’ll have to swap the green wool suit for the ink silk with the cream sleeves, dark shoes. He pulls his hand back with the vape-o and taps it with his finger. 

“Rum,” he instructs. 

“You’ll have to serve your own,” snaps Mancini, and then he sees the vape-o and falls into a chair. 

“You put your muddy feet on my desk, you’re fired.” 

Mancini’s wing-tip pauses mid-air and falls back to Earth. 

“_Porco_, you really are a bastard, you know it? I was rooting for Rogarschevsky to take on the department. Broke my heart when you got it. It really did.” 

“Rogarschevsky couldn’t run a kindergarten,” says Percival, puffing rum-flavoured smoke between them. He tosses the docket across his desk without looking, the vape-o clenched between his teeth, and swipes his lunch rubbish into the wastepaper basket. “Too damned ethical. He’d get nothing done. There’d be riots in the streets come nightfall.” 

“But only you can maintain the peace, because you are such a crooked asshole,” Mancini sighs. There is a rustle of papers as he scans the contents of the folio, his handsome mouth drawn into a grimace. He blinks. 

“It’s a mess, isn’t it?” 

“It’s too bad for this - Creden-che Bayer-bona,” he agrees. His long fingers flip through and then pause over the final sheet in the docket, the moving black and white photograph of a pale face that is almost more bone than it is feature, a sharp jaw and sunken cheeks, two eyes like black ink spots eating light from the page. “Did you meet him?” Mancini asks. 

“Briefly.” 

“And?” 

“And he looks just like his moving image,” says Percival around a mouthful of smoke. “You can tell Carlorosi he’ll be a real star on the front page once we get the official narrative together, but I don’t want to see a word about this in the papers until then.” 

“She already agrees,” says Mancini, too quickly. 

“But?” 

“But she wants more information. What is he like? He really hates wizards?” 

“He’s - ” Flashes of black hair, cruelly hacked into something like a child’s cut, like someone placed a tin bowl over his head and forced him to sit still. Dark eyes, all spindly and thin-ness and hunched into a shabby suit that might have been in style once when Percival was a small child. Uncomfortable. “He thinks we want to make him sign the Devil’s book,” he says, meeting Mancini’s startled eyes and nodding. “Won’t hold a wand. There’s another sheet in there - ” he jerks his chin at the docket, “ - with the observo-notes from last night. Never slept, won’t eat. Clawing at the door, I think, at one point. He’s all jinxed-up, as the kids say.” 

“I don’t think the kids say that,” Mancini cuts in. 

“Don’t interrupt when I’m in the middle of a debriefing,” puffs Percival. The air around them is thick with the scent of rum for a moment, dispersed by the tip of Mancini’s waved hand. “Somebody’s done something to his hands,” Percival remembers. “Or he’s done it himself. I put the order in for veritaserum. I want you to go down there with Goldstein to observe that, and then give me the full report before clock-out. Make sure you take Goldstein and let her do the questioning. She’s the one who put this whole thing together, and she’s a woman.” 

“She is a woman,” says Mancini slowly. “But I see no logical reason why - _._” 

“Women have that maternal instinct,” Percival snaps. He drops the vape-o back into his pocket after a deep parting inhale. “They’re soft. People like to talk to them.” 

“I am soft,” Mancini argues. “People like to talk to me.” 

“You are a flirt,” says Percival. “The only people who like to talk to you, want to go to bed with you.” 

“You - ” 

Jinxed. 

“I am your superior officer,” he amends, mentally swearing. He waits for Mancini to stand, smirking, along with him before tucking the docket under his arm.Blasted insubordinate, Percival thinks. And far too modish for his position. He rubs his eye and waves toward the locked door in dismissal. “Talking to you is my job, Mancini. And now - I’m kicking you out.” 

“This is your job, Percival,” says Seraphina as soon the door to her office has locked itself behind him. She does not rise from behind her desk, and he does not pause before tossing the crumpled paper mouse on top of the newspaper she had been reading before he walked in. 

“My job is to enforce the law, keep us all safe and tidy.” 

“_Your job_ is on the line.” 

“You said he was quiet!”

“He was.”

“Not when I went to see him. Not unless you consider clawing at the walls ‘quiet’. But that’s how you politicians like to talk, isn’t it? Obfuscation, outright lies!”

He catches himself pacing and is annoyed by the image it conjures in his mind of Mancini, the green and brown outfit that he will not be able to wear for another fortnight now, at least. 

“You are the head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement,” says Seraphina firmly, breaking his line of thought. “And you’re good at what you do. But, this is a mistake that needs to be fixed, regardless what you think of yourself.” 

Something in her tone grates at him, inflames the nerves already hard at work in his temple and behind his eye. She’s chastising him, he realises. Like a small child, and for something that is not even his fault. He reaches for his pocket. 

“There’s no vaping in my office. You know I can’t stand the smell.” 

“I need to think.”

“No one’s stopping you.” 

Damn her. 

“I’ve got Goldstein’s memory,” Percival says at length. He pats the hard form of the vape-o mournfully through his breast pocket. “And Mancini’s. I want you to look at them with me before any of us signs off on this kid’s release.” 

“Percival, he is clawing at the doors,” says Seraphina, as though this is argument enough. She’s changed again from her functional black silk suit into a set of robes, purple velvet, ink silk, cream. Another outfit he’ll have to put off and re-configure. Ignoring his scrutiny, Seraphina lays her hand on the desk, unfolds the paper mouse, and slides it across to him. “We have no reason to keep him in full custody for very long, and it’s costing us money. If he’s really a squib, I want him obliviated and sent home. If he has any magical ability at all, I want him discreetly integrated into society. If you think he’s a threat, I want him dealt with, and then I never want anything like this to happen again.” 

“The veritaserum,” Percival says slowly, and sighs. “I think you ought to take a look at these before we decide anything else.”

They tumble together through the wide mouth of Seraphina’s pensieve as her office melts around them, and everything is smoke before it re-forms into the dark subway tile and flickering light of the basement cells. And there is Barebone loose-limbed in a metal chair. His head lolls over the back, throat bared, his pale skin tinged grey in the half-light. Next to him, holding his hand on her lap, Goldstein sits upright on his unmade cot. Her voice and the other sounds swim dreamily as the image fixes itself into something solid, her eyes on an unseen figure standing just behind them. 

“ - how much?” He hears Mancini ask, the click of his heel as he turns and draws up another a chair from the point of his wand.

“A double dose,” says Goldstein. “The mediwitch said he had a paradoxical reaction to the first one. He was - he was screaming a lot, Mr. Mancini. He was asking for his mother.” 

“Mercy Lewis.” 

Percival can feel Seraphina shift beside him as Mancini slides into view, tugging his chair. They have both turned their attention to Barebone, along with Goldstein, who holds his hand to her chest and squeezes it lightly. She always was annoyingly earnest, Percival thinks, in a way that transcended even her sex. Even for a woman. 

“But you’re all right now, Credence,” she says softly. “Do you understand that we mean you no harm?” 

“Gave him too much,” Mancini remarks at the lolling head and slack mouth of their interviewee. “_Porco, _dammit. Pinch him? See if he doesn’t wake a little.”

“I’ll do no such thing. I just said I mean him no harm.” 

They all pause to consider the limp body on the chair before them. Barebone is more than scrawny, as Percival had originally pictured him. He remembers his initial shock upon stepping into the room earlier that morning, at how young a man could look when it was clear he hadn’t eaten well in years. Only in no-maj society did you ever see anything so pathetic, underfed creatures in ragged clothing, gaping maws. A bruise on his cheek. A wild, animal desperation in his black eyes, twisted into the hard contours of his face. It is enough, just enough, to make Percival forget himself for a moment. His stomach jumps a little at the memory and the context into which he has already filed it in his brain, on the mental shelves alongside the other shellshocked no-maj creatures from the muddy trenches of the last war. 

“He has to wake up,” says Mancini exasperatedly, jolting him from his reverie. “You are certain he didn’t get a sleeping draught instead of veritaserum?” 

“Just the veritaserum, like I told you. The double dose.”

Seraphina watches the display with a hard set to her jaw, unmoving. 

“Whose memory is this?” 

“Mancini’s,” says Percival, pointing to Goldstein on the edge of the stiff cot. “She’s not wearing brown today, but he’s colourblind. And he dislikes her.” 

Mancini is jealous of her, to put it more accurately. Resents her cleverness, Percival thinks. Resents her instinct for professionalism and the fact that she has won the favour of their director, despite her grating earnestness, for the good work she turns in consistently and without fanfare, as though she has no idea herself of her talent. She turns in neat field notes, too, which he has made no secret of appreciating. 

“You know your staff well,” Seraphina remarks, just as Barebone is beginning to stir. 

They both step back to survey. Goldstein places Barebone’s hand back in her lap. A spasm crosses his pale face then, and for a moment Percival fools himself into thinking that it was grief. Misery. Just a side-effect of the heavy dose of truth serum he’s under, Percival thinks, returning to his investigation. 

Barebone’s dark cord suit was maybe black once but is grey now, pinstriped, with white cotton piping around the collar that makes him look like a bellhop or a member of some wealthy no-maj’s household staff. It clings tightly to every angle of his skinny body. It was a child’s suit, Percival thinks suddenly. Not a particularly well-cultivated or fashionable child, but Percival can see now how the original shape of it was intended for the formless, stick-like limbs of a boy. Barebone is thin enough to have been able to squeeze himself inside it, but that does not stop the seams from pulling around his sloped shoulders, nor the good two inch gap between the hem of his trousers and the top of his scuffed boots.

He sits up in an odd way, like a disjointed doll, his head lolling just behind, his eyes unfocused. His free hand hangs loosely down the side of his chair, long-fingered and grey. It takes a moment for Percival to reconcile his voice - high and thin and scratchy from screaming - with the rest of him as he states his name, age, and address for Mancini’s automated fountain pen. 

“How did you get here?” Mancini asks sharply.

When Goldstein repeats his question, softer and placing her other hand on Barebone’s shoulder, Percival has to congratulate himself on his own wise foresight. Then Barebone begins to speak in earnest, the disinterested monotone characteristic of veritaserum, his broad face a blank mask. 

“I was walking home,” he says, as though listing ingredients for a day’s shopping. “I was going to be late. I got distracted trying to think of a reason to tell Ma so that she wouldn’t be angry, and I bumped into a man. I apologised to him, but he took me by the shoulder.” 

“You bumped into someone?” 

“It was on Henry Street,” says Barebone. “I bumped into the man, and he took me by the shoulder. And there were two more of them. They all put their hands on me. They squeezed me through the air. They brought me here.” 

“You said you were going to tell something to your Ma,” says Mancini at the same time that Goldstein asks, “were you frightened?”

“Physically,” says Seraphina quietly, “I would not consider him a threat. Would you?” 

“Ma doesn’t tolerate unpunctuality,” says Barebone in a voice so soft that Percival has to step closer to catch the rest of it. The spasm crosses his face again, like grief, or pain as Goldstein adjusts the position of his hand on her lap. 

“What does your mother do, Credence, when you are not punctual?” she asks.

“It’s not really important,” Mancini interjects, but Barebone has already begun miserably to speak. 

“She has to punish us. When we’re late, we invite the Devil in. She says, it’s like holding the door open too long. She has to fix it, so that we aren’t damned. But I didn’t mean to be late.” 

“Why were you?”

“I was watching that tall building,” Barebone gasps. His eyes swivel in their sockets as though trying to find purchase on something solid before falling back into the ether. 

“Tell me about the tall building,” says Mancini. 

“It’s the one by City Hall,” says Barebone quietly. His tone changes. He sits up suddenly and stares unseeingly at the door, his look dark and furtive. He passes his free hand over his lip. “The one with the spinning doors. Sometimes I go there, since I was a child. Ma doesn’t know. I always lie and say I was somewhere far away. Once Chastity followed me, but she couldn’t see it anyway. She never told.” 

“Explain what you saw there,” Mancini instructs. Percival can hear his pen scratching over a fresh sheet on his notepad. He is staring at Barebone now with real interest, no longer the disaffected interviewer. He taps his knee and repeats, “Tell me what you see in the building with the spinning doors, the one by City Hall.” 

It is only when the spasm freezes across his face that Percival recognises the expression that has been nagging at him, why it reminds him so chafingly of the war. 

“He’s terrified,” Seraphina remarks. “He is utterly terrified, Percival. Do you have intel on this?” 

“The wizard-haters’ club,” says Percival. He pinches the bridge of his nose, thumb in his eye socket, to stem the throbbing there. “It’s the no-maj woman he calls his ‘Ma’. We don’t have to watch all of it now, but she’s got him terrified. Beats him. He thinks she wants to burn us all at the stake, and she probably does.” 

The scene changes as he waves his hand. Now Barebone is secured to the chair at his wrists and ankles, stripped to his shirt and waistcoat, and Goldstein is crouched beside him so that she can keep hold of his hand. He is shaking.

“Paradoxical reaction,” Percival explains. “They’re not sure why yet, but it wears off on him in minutes, and he gets irate. Throws things. Shouts.” 

“He’s been watching us,” says Seraphina. “Spying on us.” 

“He thinks we’re all operants of the Devil,” Percival says wearily. “But he likes our paper mouse memos and the wand-cleaning machine. He watches it sometimes through the windows on the revolving doors.” 

There is silence. They watch Barebone slump into his chair and begin to sob.

“You want me to keep him in custody,” says Seraphina finally. Her voice sags. It occurs to him that she has looked exhausted lately, more so than usual. 

“That’s my official recommendation. For now.” 

“And your unofficial recommendation?”

He is aware of the weight of her gaze on him. She knows what he’s going to say, he thinks. Jinx her for making him do it out loud, when she already knows and likely already agrees. 

“You’ve seen him,” he says, more roughly than he intends. Barebone continues to sob across the room as Mancini gathers his notes. He softens. “The boy’s a wreck. Obliviate him, I say. Give him a couple dollars and send him north across the Canadian border. Or - look, how do you integrate that kind of broken into a society and expect it to function? Would you want to live like that?” 

“Is that really for us to decide?” 

“You are the elected leader,” Percival says. “Of the Magical Congress of the United States of America. I am the arm of the law.”

“Everything is for us to decide.”

“_Noblesse oblige_,” says Percival. “But, there’s more in Goldstein’s memory that I’d like to show you first.”

It happens after Mancini leaves. Gradually at first - Barebone falls forward and Goldstein catches him. She strokes his hand, his face, his hair. This is the source of all that obnoxious Pollyanna-ism, Percival thinks. The very root of the thing that rubs everyone the wrong way. She is earnest because she is good and good because she is kind, and even Barebone seems to sense it. He stops crying, at least.

“Help me,” he whispers. 

Percival watches Seraphina cross the room to his side, were she kneels, frowning, to listen. 

“Please help me,” Barebone is saying. “Please help me.” 

And Goldstein, who is too good for her own good, glances over her shoulder before releasing his hands from the magical shackles on his metal chair.

“You promised you would be good for my friend,” she says sadly as he clings to her. “I can only help you when you help yourself, Credence. You have to trust me.” 

“Help me,” Barebone repeats, like a gramophone with a broken needle. 

“You’re safe here,” says Goldstein. “This is a government. There are laws here to protect you. I meant it when I told you before that you’re only here for your own safety, Credence. Do you understand? It’s not going to be forever. We don’t hold people indefinitely; we have laws. We just need to know some things about you, so we know how to help you. We can help you, if you help yourself, and stop all this.” 

“I want to go home,” Barebone says. 

“And stop shouting,” Goldstein continues, steadfast,“and stop throwing things, and stop scratching at the door. You have to trust us that we want to help you, because you belong here. No one can explain it until you’re ready to listen.” 

“I want to go home,” says Barebone, his voice cracking. He throws his head into his hands and pulls away from her. His ankles are still shacked to the chair. Realising this, he cries out in frustration. He pulls his hair. His hands shake. His chest heaves rapidly, shallowly. Panic, Percival thinks. Goldstein must sense this too, because she tries to hold him again and shakes her head when he throws her off.

“We can help you, Credence. I want to help you.” 

“I want go home,” he snarls. “I won’t sign your book, and I said I won’t sign it. Please God, let me just go home!”

The hand on Percival’s elbow makes him jump, but it is only Seraphina, who gives him a sharp look and says, “I think we’ve seen enough, Director Graves.” 

They depart the memory in another swirl of smoke and sound, to Credence Barebone shrieking in his chair as he is restrained again by a pair of mediwizards in purple robes and Goldstein shouting for calm, for order, for gentleness. 

Seraphina says, “I want you to go down there tomorrow, Mr. Graves,” and he is Mister Graves now. At some point in the dungeon of his aurors’ memories, they became formal to one another again, too close to a stranger’s trauma. He nods curtly and she- Madame President, not Seraphina - says sternly, “Not tonight. Let him calm down first. See if they can’t give him something for that. Send Mancini out to question this woman he calls his mother, and then go and see him in the morning. If you really think his ability is so deficient, then I agree. The humane route is obliviation.” 

“And we send him on his way,” says Percival. Something else nags at him. He brushes it off with the hand he has raised to his breast pocket, with which he pointedly withdraws the silver vape-o. 

“And we send him on his way,” Seraphina agrees, with a nod at the open door.


	2. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things take off.  
Thank you to anyone still with me!

THERE IS no hope of coffee that morning. Work accosts him before he can properly cross the threshold to slam his office door behind him, paper mice and owls scratching and pecking at the sudden obstacle. Jinx them all, Percival thinks, before he lets them in.

Five years prior, when he had been in the running against Rogarschevsky, the matter of Percival’s ascension to head of the department had seemed a logical conclusion to the problems facing their beleaguered and overly bureaucratic little corner of government. It had felt, he knew, to many to be a way out, a necessity. They would never have gotten anything done under that no-maj-loving moralist, would all be sifting paperwork and picketing the office of Madame President on an end to this-and-that old law, that-and-this old policy.

This is what he tells himself as he shoves a stack of paperwork - half-read - into the middle-right drawer of his desk. He flicks his wrist impatiently at the door (and the jinxed racket of it flying off the wall) and rubs his temple (to clear the headache, the urge to hand in his resignation and retire to the sticky peace of some orange grove in Florida, sweltering and far from here).

Before he can call for Mancini, the messenger of all this bad news appears in his doorway. Languid, vaping. Rakish in lavender.

“You read my note,” Mancini remarks drily. He drops the vape-o into his linen breast pocket and adds, “You’ll have to change his guard. Every day it’s becoming worse, I am told.”

“I’d like to see for myself.”

“Go and look, then,” says Mancini, shrugging. Relishing, no doubt, the fact he knows something Percival doesn’t, for once.“I talked to the mother like you told me, the wizard-hater. She’s a wretched woman. I think he doesn’t miss her now - ” another loose shrug, he flicks a curl from his forehead, “ - and now, she doesn’t miss him. Obliviated her. I saved the memories that were important for you.”

“Good, good,” says Percival. Then he jabs his finger into the desk. “But what about all this nonsense here? Changing his guard? What’s he been doing to set them off?”

“Existing,” says Mancini.

‘Existing’ hangs over his head like a dark cloud throughout the morning, rendering concentration on anything else impossible. _Existing,_ he muses, as he signs off on an order to increase patrols through the park on Sunday evenings. He has Goldstein take down the paperwork to get her dour mood and long face out of the office; he eats a late breakfast. In the bathroom, he clips his nails and hums, _existing existing existing _to the jingle from a radio ad for all-purpose cleaning solution, until it gives him a headache_. _Someone in the office slams a door, breaking his attempt at a letter to Theseus Scamander, who has been waiting on a response for far longer than Percival would like to admit. _Existing!_ His vape-o is in need of a refill. He hesitates over the rum and goes for the coffee, slams his desk drawer, opens it, slides it gently back into place. He thinks, _existing._

He decides to make the visit after lunch, which is mostly coffee and a quiet vape in his office. By that point, the paperwork he had hoped to ignore in the morning has swelled to a considerable size. He sets his secretary to the task of sifting through and sorting by importance, watching as the pile of ‘complete at once’ quickly outgrows that of ‘to-do-at-some-point’. His temples throb.

“I’m going downstairs,” he tells her. “Tell Goldstein to come and find me in an hour’s time.”

The problem becomes apparent immediately as he arrives in the empty corridor. The door to Barebone’s cell swings on its hinge like a loose tooth. Cursing, Percival clatters around the bend. He draws his wand, preparing for the worst, and very nearly stupefies one of the young guards as he backs out, laughing, into the corridor from the open doorway.

“Director Graves!”

“Suspension,” snaps Percival, shoving past. “For whatever it is you’ve been doing. Go.”

Barebone he finds huddled in a corner of the cell, his hands over his face, chanting his no-maj prayers as a glass of milk hovers around his ears, dripping itself steadily over his head. It disappears at a wave of Percival’s hand, and then he becomes aware of the second guard at his elbow, loud protestations.

“Directors Graves, sir - ”

“Fired, if you don’t get out of my sight,” says Percival over his shoulder. “Flagrant abuse of a wizard in custody. Disregard of the law. Abandonment of post.”

“But, Director - !”

“I’ll have you before a Tribunal next, you waste any more of my time.”

Retreating footsteps. He waits until they break into a run, clattering down the corridor, to lock the door with a lazy wave of his hand. The headache that has been threatening his eye sockets all morning finally makes headway, twinging across the upper confines of his skull and down to the base of his neck. Barebone is still praying, he realises. Something about that tugs a little, just below his ribs. Jinx them all, he thinks again. He barks -

“Get up, Mr. Barebone. On your feet. That’s enough!”

Miraculously, it works.

Though he could hardly call it an improvement, Barebone drops his hands and rises to his feet in a single, awkward movement, like a puppet tugged up by a jerk to its strings. He stares hard into the floor, his breathing oddly slow, his shoulders drawn up around his neck like a roosting bird. Another little tug to his ribs, the sense of nagging remembrance returns.

“Here,” says Percival abruptly, dropping a hand into his jacket pocket. Ignoring Barebone’s flinch, he draws out a carton the size of a matchbox, printed with beachy pink and yellow stars and stripes. “It’s candy,” he says to Barebone’s milk-beaded forehead. “You like candy? Sure, you like candy. Even I like candy. Come on, take it.”

“I won’t sign- ”

“Enough about that curse-wrecked book,” says Percival firmly. “Frankly, Mr. Barebone, I don’t care if you never sign a jinxed thing in your life. Now, take the candy before my arm gets tired of offering.”

Something about his words stirs the terror in the boy into a crude kind of boldness, driving his eyes up to meet Percival’s own. His shoulders drop just so, a bit, allowing him to make brief but uncanny eye contact. His painfully close-cropped hair is mussed and dirty and stands upright in tufts. Milk-wet. He looks half-wild, like the moving embroidery of a fox Percival had stared at often when he was still small enough to be known affectionately by the household staff as Young Percy. The hunting dogs baying silently from across the tapestry, always just in view, would drive the fox to the very far corner of the cloth where it would wait, trapped and staring back out at him. At times, he remembers, they would catch and devour it, and he would cry out until his nanny came to take him away, scolding him for torturing himself.

Barebone moves like his brain has lost contact with the rest of his body; his joints approximating human movement. Years of training in interviewing mostly criminals have given Percival the sense to watch for the smaller details; a pale hand lifts in the bottom of his sight, darts out. He tries not to register his surprise at the brief contact of their fingers before relinquishing the carton.

“Sherbet pips,” he says. “Can’t get them in New York. Import laws and copyright and all that. They’re from London.” Some impulse seizes him, a memory of Goldstein’s younger sister handing out coffee to the junior aurors in his office. He adds on almost gently, “You’ll be one of only a handful in this building to have ever tried them, so go on.”

Footsteps echo past in the corridor beyond the door, reverberate magically louder. He watches Barebone’s face, his eyes snapping shut in a kind of spasm that pinches his lips together, his shoulders raised again. It only lasts a second before his fingers peel back the lid of the carton. Percival notes their unnatural stiffness, the way they move without bending at the joint, curved just so to accommodate a single pink dot of candy which Barebone holds delicately between his teeth before swallowing it whole.

(The nagging, the annoying weight in his ribs.)

“Chew it,” he finds himself directing. “Look here.”

Barebone repeats his spasm. Pretending not to notice, he tosses a handful of candy into his mouth and continues, “Stand up straight, then. None of that whimpering behaviour. Chew like this. You can take more than one at once, too. You only have one life, you don’t want to waste half of it pecking at candy.”

He watches as Barebone cracks another yellow dot in half with his teeth and chews it slowly, like medicine, before swallowing.

“Better,” he sighs. “Keep the box. Pep you up, after whatever was going on in here before. I’m having your friend Goldstein assigned here for the rest of the day. She’ll see to it that you get a hot lunch, and then - ” He withdraws himself to the door, watching carefully Barebone’s little startle, his blinking, his clockwork consumption of the candy he still holds like a hot brick in his hand. The decision comes suddenly to him, sliding firmly into place in his mind without bothering to consult his better sense.

“Then Mr. Barebone,” says Percival, “we’re going to have a meeting in my office, you and I, to see if we can’t find a solution to you, once and for all.”

Of course Seraphina finds out, though Percival had not intended to tell her until he had time to pin it all down in a carefully-worded confidential report. She finds him in his office after Mancini has departed with another billet to the no-maj church in Henry Street.

“You can keep that,” she says, indicating the vape-o he had been about to drop back into his pocket as she entered. “It’s your office.”

“Generous of you,” says Percival, but he leaves it anyway and stands to offer her his chair.

“I’m here about - ”

“ - the Barebone issue,” Percival finishes for her. “Which should be standing in my office presently. Cuffed,” he adds, glancing at her. Her hair is wrapped in gold today, her expression inscrutable as she observes him. On noting that detail, the wind goes out of him. The adrenaline he’d been operating on since his trip the cells withdraws from his bloodstream, leaving him cold, his hands clammy. He sits back down. “I’m running out of ideas,” he admits. The reluctance that usually accompanies such a confession is strangely absent. There’s a cold but definite comfort in her rank superiority, in the fact that she could put a stop to him at any given moment, if she so chose. But she hasn’t. She merely continues to watch him in unreadable silence as he runs a hand through his hair and then pushes it back into place. He gives in and goes for the vape-o in his breast pocket.

“You think it’s safe?” she asks finally. “Even cuffed?”

“It’s certainly a breech of protocol,” he admits through a cloud of brown vapour.

Safety is another issue entirely, as they both well know.

“I wanted to say that I was surprised, when I got the note. No,” she adds, raising an eyebrow at him, “I won’t tell you who it was. I have my sources in every department.”

“As you should.”

“As necessity demands.”

“Practical of you,” Percival agrees.

“When I appointed you,” Seraphina begins, her expression finally breaking into something he can interpret, a bared tooth, a frown, “over Rogarschevsky, it wasn’t because I thought you any better at management, Percival. Actually, he’s better with people than you can be. He’s not charming, but he listens.”

“Noted,” Percival replies, but she raises a hand to shush him.

“He has no creativity,” she says. “He’s incapable of thinking with any amount of ingenuity, which has always been your strongest suit, even if you’ve never seen it that way.”

“On the contrary,” he says, “I’ve always considered myself a genius.”

Her mouth twitches. He sits back and vapes deeply in relief.

Seraphina turns toward the door, clearing her throat.

She says, “I’m trusting you to sort this out today, Director Graves.”

And then she’s gone.

If he’s honest with himself, Percival had hoped she’d stick around a while longer, until Barebone had got there. He would have appreciated her immediate feedback on his handling of the situation, however it plays out.

He tends to enjoy the weight of responsibility his work so often bears. Without anyone at home to look after, as many of his subordinates have, he can throw himself fully into the protection of their society. Into maintaining its many secrets, upholding its many laws, punishing wrongdoing where need be and rewarding good behaviour as he sees fit. He enjoys possessing the kind of power that comes specifically attached to responsibility, power by merit, as opposed to the sort bestowed on him by his sex, as last male in his maternal and paternal lines, or by birth, for that matter, or by class, by rote of wealth.

This is a different beast entirely. Again, he thinks of the tapestry fox and the baying hounds. In the kinds of children’s books that littered his nursery floor as a boy, the fox was always the cunning predator lurking just round the corner as the hapless talking hare made his way off to bunny school or his bunny desk job. Children are stupid in this way, Percival reasons. They cannot see beyond their own small universe, they need everything to make sense, even if it means that the fox is always the predator and the hare always the walking dinner and the baying hound a mere product of needle and thread in a father’s heirloom wall piece. He puts his vape away again, feeling instantly refreshed, mature, evolved.

Outside the walls of his office, the department is buzzing. He had seen all their wall-eyed stares; they knew as soon as he set foot in the door, though not because of Goldstein, he guesses. Mancini was the likely big mouth, still voicing his disapproval loudly with his feet on his desk. Percival barks out an order for coffee merely for the satisfaction of seeing him jump.

After that, he is forced to wait for Barebone to come shambling through his office door, where he directs Goldstein to stand guard so that the it may swing shut behind the boy’s hunched back, granting them a crumb of privacy, however small.

“Just a minute,” Percival tells him, though he might as well have spoken to the wall. Barebone continues to stare at his own feet in their scuffed black boots - laceless, magicked to stay on - where two thin silver anklets glean brightly beneath the too-short hem of his trousers. Now the tug at Percival’s bottom rib is stronger, and he finds that he can place it to a memory a decade hence, when he’d first tried sherbet pips from a tin in a British soldier’s pocket. It was the day he’d met Theseus, he remembers. Theseus, crunching candy at his side, in a muddy foxhole. He’d explained in undertone as they watched the line of depressed no-maj soldiers straggle through their section of the trench, what it was they were looking at. Some of them had been mere boys, glassy-eyed in terror, muttering prayers or pleas or curses, their uniforms specked with mud and sometimes with blood. The youngest, at the very end, was missing half his hand. He held the incomplete flesh, wrapped in rust-stained gauze, to his chest like one would hold an infant, and when he passed, Percival could hear that he was humming the tune to a bawdy song they all came back singing from the bordellos in town. _En route for no-man’s land_, Theseus had whispered. _Sometimes they shoot them, but they’re low on bullets here, with the embargo. They’ve been letting the other side take care of it for them._

“To be clear,” he says suddenly, lowering his hand from the application of muffling charms to the office walls and door, “it should never have come to this, with you. The very root of your problems lies in a paperwork error, unfortunately. You ought to have been registered at birth and taken in by some magical family, or at the very least, placed in a nursery school, until you were old enough for magical education.”

He watches for any sign of acknowledgement, but Barebone continues to stare dully at the toe of his boots.

“I’d offer you to sit down,” Percival continues. He waits. “Something tells me you’d rather stand.”

“Yes, sir,” says Barebone, so quietly that Percival nearly has to crane closer to hear him.

It’s an improvement from his frantic door-scratching antics, and one that Percival accepts with a curt nod. Still, he wishes that he was holding his vape-o, if only to stop himself reaching for his still-throbbing forehead.

There is a moment, very brief, when he wonders if he made the right decision after all in drudging all this up to an office floor. The difference in impression between Barebone-in-the-dungeon and Barebone-in-the-office is one that lies entirely in background contrast. It had all fit, in a cell. The odd, cropped haircut, the ungainly scrambling around, the anguish and the pleading and snarling and the poorly-fitted suit, so long out of fashion that it gives Percival another little jolt of headache. He wonders what ever possessed no-maj men to dress themselves like elevator operators for everyday wear. And then he remembers that Barebone is only twenty-five, wearing a suit as old as he is, and he wonders if he wasn’t inherited at some point as a cast-off from a bellhop in a no-maj hotel. The image depresses him.

“Did you eat?” he asks.

A twitch, a jerky puppet’s movement. 

“Yes, sir.”

“What did you eat?”

“Macaroni and chicken,” Barebone says. “And green things.”

“Vegetables,” Percival suggests.

“Not normal ones,” Barebone counters. He risks a glance up at Percival, his eyelashes fluttering, before snapping his attention back to his boots.

“All vegetables are normal. How do you mean?”

His shoulder jerks in a half-shrug, a gesture Percival is almost ready to accept for insolence, except that Barebone bites his lip and shrinks back into himself as soon as he catches it.

“They looked like little trees,” he says in his soft, raw voice.

“Broccoli,” Percival tells him. “Normal to most people, but maybe not to you. Most children grow up despising them.”

“They taste like smoke.”

“An odd, but apt comparison,” Percival replies. He gives the boy another look-over, noting the silver bracelets round his wrists, stopping him from raising his arms, no doubt. Among other things. “How do you know what smoke tastes like?”

Barebone meets his eye again, his head shooting up too quickly to have been anything but compulsion, his mouth twisted around the surge of some dark emotion - anguish. “Because - ” He breaks off, casting about the room as though for an answer, though Percival can see his tongue darting out to wet his lips. He knows well enough how to spot a skilled concealer of the truth. Barebone is hardly that. His omission is practically written across his sharp face.

“Don’t bother,” says Percival, raising his hand. The body before it shrinks back, as though expecting a blow. He sighs, “I told you before that life is short. Too short to waste on a bad lie.”

“You said there’s a magical school,” Barebone says, breaking from his cringing act to make eye contact again. “That I could go to.”

“Could have done,” Percival corrects him. He masks his surprise at the change in topic with a wave of his hand. “You’re too old now. Most finish at eighteen. You ought to have started at eleven, had you been properly registered.”

Something like disappointment crosses Barebone's face, drawing his shoulders down. And bitterness, Percival thinks, watching his eyes fix themselves, glittering, on the hand that had cast the silencing charms. Then he blinks and the emotion is gone, walled back in by his careful control.

“So, there’s nothing for me here,” he says at last. “You won’t let me stay.”

“Ten minutes ago, you were screaming all about a book you wouldn’t sign.”

He watches Barebone’s bottom lip disappear below his top teeth.

“If you want to stay,” he continues, tapping the paper stack on his desk, “you would have to prove that you possess a sufficient amount of magical skill. Otherwise you’ll be obliviated - that means having your memories of all this erased, it’s utterly painless - and sent on your way. I was thinking Canada for you. It’s very nice on the west coast. A little rainy, mild summer. But I am open to suggestions, if there’s anywhere you have ever desperately wanted to visit.”

“My mother - ”

“ - has already been obliviated,” says Percival. “She won’t remember that you’ve gone, the son she lost to the ‘flu in ’18.”

A choking kind of noise stirs itself up from the boy’s throat.

“Witchcraft,” he mutters, more to himself than to Percival. His hands twitch against the magic binding them to his side.

“A very benign kind of witchcraft, intended to remove you from the control of a woman who has publicly advocated for the death of people exactly like yourself. Would you rather have gone back to her?”

“I could have gone to school,” says Barebone again, trembling. He shakes his head, looking suddenly lost, younger than his years.

“Bygones - ”

“A magical school.”

“That’s the general idea of them, yes.”

Percival watches his scrawny body struggling against the confines of the magical shackles with half his attention, the other on his wristwatch. If they can cut this short, he thinks, he might be able to squeeze in an extra minute for a vape while he pretends to finish up the paperwork. He could even offer Barebone a little puff as a parting gift. That would be fair and decent. It’s the only one he’ll ever have in his life, a rite of passage, before the memory of it all is scrubbed clean off his consciousness.

“If a person turns to mediums or necromancers,” says Barebone slowly, startling him from this line of thought. His breathing comes in shallow spurts of air, punctuating his words as he continues, “whoring after them, I will set my face against that person and will cut him off from among his people - ”

Percival lowers his watch with another sigh.

“Not to rush you, Mr. Barebone, but I am a very busy man - ”

“I thought that you were kind,” says Barebone, as bitterly as though he had been struck.

“I'm going to set you down for Toronto,” says Pervical, eying the second hand. “Though, you're free to change your mind.”

It’s raining outside, he remembers suddenly, and he thinks, _jinx it_. There will be no time for another quiet vape, not even in his own office, before he goes to inform Seraphina of his recommendation for obliviation. He’ll have to have Goldstein call in the Obliviators in a minute. Something about it strikes him as sad, in a detached kind of way, as Barebone sinks to his knees, his chest pumping.

“Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murders and idolators, and everyone who loves and practises falsehood - ”

“Sounds like a party, if you ask me,” he hums, reaching for a memo-pad.

“ - their portion will be in the lake that burns fire and sulphur, which is the second death - ”

The boy has a flair for melodrama of the most insipid kind. No-maj pedestrianism. The taste of smoke, Percival thinks, just stopping himself from rolling his eyes. He draws up a pen from the tip of his wand, contemplating only briefly that he could put an end to this fit with a little stream of water from the very same, the way he would extinguish a flame, as his nanny had been wont to do with him in the days of Young Percy. That would be unprofessional, however. And cruel, besides. Another glance at Barebone’s stringy hair tugs at his ribs. He opens his mouth to intervene -

Barebone’s thin back trembles in fury, or heartbreak, or whichever emotion he’s cycling through with such expert showmanship, with such craft, thinks Percival -

And the lamp overhead bursts into a shower of sparks, then a cloud of glittering dust that descends around them like volcano ash, coating the furniture, the pen in his hand, his silk lapel.The wind goes out of the room in a rush, rebounds against the locked door, roars the papers from his desk.  
Barebone lets out a low moan.

“Well, there’s no need to cry about it,” says Percival with forced calm, blinking glass dust from his eyes.

The quiet, after all that, is almost as alarming as the explosion itself, the force of the explosion. The explosion within the wards of his office, Percival’s mind rattles. Within the wards, within the building, within the headquarters for Magical Security. His heart pounds. He sets the office back to rights with a sweep of his wand, leaving the glass dust in a pile for housekeeping, the lamp a lost cause. He thinks - magic! He had been wrong, despite his usually reliable instincts pointing him in the direction of squib, of non-skill, of ship-him-off-to-Canada. What they would have shipped off to Canada, he thinks, feeling dazed. Even with the admonitors intact, to have managed a feat of violence -

“I’d say that settles it, anyway,” he says. The jelly of his brain seems to swell in his skull. He digs his thumbs into the hollow below his brow and continues, “We’ll have to find somewhere safe to put you up in the meantime, and someone to teach you how to control yourself before you blow up a building.”

From the crouched position on his knees on the other side of the desk, Barebone begins to weep.

His official recommendation to Seraphina is lodging, confinement, security, look into the possibility of training for work in the Department. He stamps it with the tip of his wand and sends it off with Goldstein, who scurries off with many a backwards glance, seeking answers she knows he cannot give.

Seraphina sends back her permission, nary a raised eyebrow or ‘told-you-so’, merely her gentle and professional recommendation that he take the weekend off.

So passes Autumn, the main fanfare confined to falling leaves and incomprehensible no-maj parades. Relief from the heat is soon followed by a bitter cold that sets itself into the very bricks of the city, driving beggars and schoolchildren and players of no-maj table games from their usual purchase on street corners. The markets thrum. The tracks for disused elevated lines remain an eyesore, but Percival is happy and satisfied and overall at peace.

It proves surprisingly easy to get the government’s new ward settled. Barebone makes the minimum amount of fuss about his cheap accommodations in a fortified room at the Diversorium - a kind of magical hotel, they’d explained to him. In truth, it’s more of a lodging house for foreign wizards and those who have proved themselves incapable of maintaining discretion in their daily lives - anyone deemed a candidate for flagrant abuse of Rappaport’s Law. A monthly budget is drawn up by accounting to the sum of two hundred dragots, much of which they divest in security. Barebone’s taste is simple, his expectations low. He remarks only once, to Goldstein, that he would rather live closer to the ground floor, heights make him nervous.

If Percival had expected protest at the level of control they are now exerting over this young man’s life, he might also have known he was going to be disappointed. But he remembers the main points in the dossier on the Barebone woman all too well. No - it’s not the fact that Barebone has accepted a small room and smaller allowance, or the near-constant observation, or even the restrictions on where he is allowed to go and at which times, that jars him.

He glances at his ceiling one morning, where the replacement lamp hangs low and green in stead of the red one that had occupied its place prior. That was the only and last sign of magic from Young Merlin, as he’s known throughout the department.

Powerful, Percival had thought at the time they’d assigned this nickname. Though he had harboured no naive optimism, he has to admit that even he had let himself buy into the excited whispers circulating the department that they had discovered, entirely by fate and chance, a hidden genius. Just a little, he had hoped to see quick headway in Barebone’s progress. He had even deigned to attend a lesson or two himself as an overseer, taking notes.

Not that there’s anything particularly worth committing to paper. The boy is a rag. A magical wash. Whatever talent festered in him once, he had long ago damped down - suffocated perhaps - in his deceivingly thin and shaky body. A simple _Lumos_ is beyond him.

Now, the report informs in detached departmental jargon, he’s refusing to hold a wand again, asking to be obliviated and sent to Canada. Percival has to swallow his smirk as he puts through a set of orders. By the time he returns to his desk from a vape and a late lunch at the Bosporous, Mancini’s memo-mouse has nibbled through six pages of notes on illegal kneazle smuggling and a rise in burglaries in a magical skiing village in Colorado. It's also put a hole through his Hermes scarf, he notes with an annoyed sigh, as he unfolds its head from its wriggling body and watches it fall into still paper in the palm of his hand.

“Right,” he says to no one in particular.

Apart from the occasional secretary, the department is largely empty. Most of his aurors are back on routine assignments now that things have settled. He calls for Goldstein, testing, but the office coughs its own bored silence back in his face, so he departs quickly, leaving the mouse-eaten scarf to dangle from the edge of his desk like the arm of a corpse.

He knows that Barebone is home. The schedule tells him this, neatly printed into the back of his pocket ledger. He reads in undertone to himself, though, as its author, he already knows it by heart: at four or just before dawn, Barebone awakens for ‘solemn contemplation’, whatever that means. He does this until quarter-to-six, when he eats his breakfast. From eight to ten, he is allowed two hours time to devote to errands or personal engagements in the city, under supervision. This is applies only to Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, Percival’s slow days, when he has the bulk of his staff on hand to respond to emergencies. On all other days, he is to stay home. At noon, Barebone takes his dinner, which is what he calls lunch, for whatever reason, and then he has another hour of lessons, a half an hour to walk in the park, if he chooses to use it, followed by a blackout period from two-thirty to seven, when he is allowed a second walk to clear his head before going to sleep.

The schedule is almost as depressing as the young man whose life it dictates, but Percival has never indulged in his own impulses for sentimentality. Snapping the book shut and sliding it back into his coat pocket, he decides that he won’t begin now.

Barebone answers the front door in the same quiet voice that Percival remembers from his office. A little less raw now, he thinks, without all the screaming, and then he coughs to stop this line of thought before it turns maudlin again.

“Sir,” says Barebone formally, his head bowed as he backs into the room to accommodate Percival’s expansive coat. “Please come in.”

There’s barely time to give him a one-over before he’s off to the little kitchenette in the corner of his room, stirring a pot, taking down mugs for coffee or tea or milk or whatever it was he’d offered that Percival hadn’t caught before agreeing to it. He moves with the same ungainly gestures, the puppet person, but doesn’t pause to consider the location of anything in his small collection of belongings, pulling down a tin of tea, a jug of milk, a second tin of coffee onto a battered sideboard, wiping spills with a checkered rag. How different a change in context can truly make a person, Percival thinks, watching him pull a spoon from a drawer at his waist, stirring a pot on the stove which smells as much as it looks like unseasoned, watery vegetables. 

“Would you like sugar?” he asks, turning. Percival can see then that he’s filled out in the month since they had last been this close, the angles of his face rounded pleasantly, his eyes brighter.

“On second thought,” he says, “I’ll have whatever you’re making for yourself.”

“Tea,” Barebone supplies instantly. “Do you take milk or sugar, Mr. Graves?”

“Neither,” says Percival. Then, driven by curiosity, he amends, “Give me whatever it is you’re having.”

“Milk and sugar,” says Barebone quietly, more to himself than to Percival, though it’s evident by the tremor in his hand that this is a new addition to his routine.

He takes the chance while Barebone’s back is turned to survey the room. He knows from his own private memos that Mancini had been the one to charm the windows for ground-floor views and regular spills of sunshine, even on rainy days. _Small comforts_, he’d said distractedly, as though it was beneath his notice.

Small comforts, Percival finds, are everywhere. A green wallpaper painted with vines that shift occasionally as though caught in a breeze, lends the room a sleepy, jungle feeling. The mustard-coloured sofa, Percival knows, was not a fixture supplied by the Diversorium, nor is the decorative pillow in its lap, embroidered with purple flowers and a hummingbird that flits in and out of the neighbouring pillow to draw nectar from a single flower that someone had embroidered by hand over the checkered print. It’s the light green and gold intarsia effect on the wool blanket on the bed, however, that gives Mancini away.

“Oh,” says Barebone uncomfortably in response to his query. “Erm, yes. Mr. Mancini has been kind to me.”

“More than, I would say,” remarks Percival. He pretends to ignore the look that Barebone shoots him for his prying, the brief but dark flash of his eyes before handing over a mug of weak, milky tea.

“He says everyone needs a friend,” says Barebone, frowning. “And a comfortable bed to wake up in, if nothing else.”

Percival chokes on his tea.

He’s just beginning a mental reprimand of Mancini when Barebone interrupts him, 

“Sir, if I could get you something else - ”

“He’s right,” Percival cuts him off, his mouth suddenly dry. For reasons he could not begin to explain even to himself, he feels the need to put some distance between himself and Barebone and his narrow iron bed. He crosses the room in three strides to deposit his tea on the table opposite.

And then he shakes his head, rubbing the space between his eyes.

“The reason I came to see you, Mr. Barebone - ”

“ - is because I asked to go to Canada,” Barebone finishes for him.

If he’s as relieved at the change of subject, he holds his cards well. Percival squints at him, intent on finding the tell-tale crack in his demeanour, the little flag indicating some territory of flesh and bone already travailed, laid claim to by his enemy. A hickey, he thinks, or a mussed hair. It shouldn’t matter, but it does. Inexplicably.

The distance between them has made Barebone scrawny again, elbows still pointy, knees still the wider portion of his legs, which Percival can see even through the silhouette of his trousers. Someone - probably Mancini, he thinks darkly - has taken the trouble of supplying him with a new suit. Black as the old one, without the greying elbows and shoulders where years of friction had rubbed the dye straight out of the cotton cord. This one is wool, he notices, not the product of a draper’s, or at least not of a skilled one, as it’s just-tight in the waist, loose on the legs, a little long in the sleeve. It looks jarringly familiar.

“Mr. Barebone,” he hears himself say as the subject of this address draws his shoulders in (shoulders too tight, needed to be widened, which any decent draper would have known to do - ), “The fact remains, that you put on quite a display of ability in my office. The kind of display that can’t be brushed off, or considered an accident. Not in the sense that you would like it to have been.”

“I haven’t shown any skills since,” Barebone argues. He stops there, wincing and Percival gets the sense from his face that he has found himself on the tipping point of some mental precipice. Probably unused to voicing his own disagreement without repercussions, he tells himself, recalling the dossier. And it’s only because the kid looks so pained that he draws the little carton of sherbet candies from his pocket.

“I’m not changing the subject,” he says, once Barebone is marvelling at the carton in his odd limp grip. “And I didn’t order those for you,” he adds with a nod, although he had. “But you - now - ” he clears his throat and casts around for a way to get them back to business, kicking himself for the gift, which has Barebone flushing and unable to meet his eye. “The thing is,” he says, stalling, before he finds the thread at last, and continues briskly, “The thing is, that you’ve got magical skill, and there’s no doubt about it. And it’s probably considerable, taking into account the mess you made of my office.”

“Considerable,” repeats Barebone dubiously.

“Undoubtedly,” Percival repeats.

The pause this sets into the conversation feels unnatural, broken only by the clink of a mug on the kitchen workspace. He redirects his attention to the animated wallpaper and the hummingbird, now perched on an embroidered leaf and watching them both with the detached eye of an alchemist. Lucky little bastard in its carefully threaded paradise. Whatever had possessed the sadist who had woven the tapestry of the fox and its hunters - he digs his knuckle even more firmly into the hollow below his brow.

Sunlight pours in through the window ever brighter, scouring colour from the bed and the green curtains, the scratched floorboards. Maybe it’s his brain supplying the warmth, Percival thinks, to match the artificial light. He wonders idly, shifting so that his shirt un-sticks itself from the heat of his back, if the window has been charmed to match Barebone’s mood. It’s an oddly personal touch for Mancini, who had never struck him before as particularly sentimental.

“Mr. Graves, if you could please excuse me,” says Barebone, having apparently reached whatever decision he had been brooding over.

“Depends on what you want to be excused for.”

“Maybe we can just drink our tea,” he says. “I’m not very used to hosting guests.”

“If you’d rather I take my leave,” says Percival.

He rubs his upper lip as Barebone makes murmurs to the contrary, his shiftiness returning, twitching and flinching, as he though he expects to be struck for having dared speak up at all.

“I’m very grateful to you for coming to see me, sir.”

“Director,” Percival corrects him automatically. 

He curses whatever brought forth this impulse for rank correctness as he watches Barebone’s mouth snap shut, his eyes shuttering dully. It’s such an immediate shift from presence to detachment that the contemplation of it alone leaves him winded. Before he can scrape the words for an apology together from the back of his throat, the scene in the window shifts, birdsong filtering through the dreamy sunlight, drawing both of their gazes towards the swaying trees rapidly replacing streetlamps on the avenue below. A meadow forms itself as they watch, water trickling around its hills until it thickens into a stream.

“It does that sometimes,” Barebone says after a pause. He looks at Percival sideways through his lashes, frowning.

“When you feel depressed,” suggests Percival.

“When I’m afraid,” he admits. “It does different things, if - when I feel low, sir. Director.”

“Do you feel low often?”

“I - ”

“That was very personal,” says Percival quickly, sensing discomfort. “As Director for the Department tasked with your care, I’ve - you’ll have to forgive me.” He takes up his mug against as a shield against the little flit of gaze interrupting Barebone’s blank study of the floor.

“I’m very grateful to you, Director,” Barebone says again. “You’ve given me more of a life than I ever had before. I can go around the city however I like, sir, and eat what I like, and I have some money and a clean home. I truthfully couldn’t ask for any more, or really repay you - ”

Something in his tone is so careful, so excruciatingly polite, as though he had taken the words from his tongue and presented them to Percival carved into a tablet, like those of his no-maj God, that it yanks the clever response from between Percival’s teeth. He feels chastised, somehow. Like a little boy caught with his hand in the hamper of sweets intended as a gift for the cook’s children.

To his utter dismay, Barebone continues in earnest. He presses his hands together before his waist, so that the silver admonitors slip out just so on his naked wrists, little flashes beneath his dark sleeves. He’s clearly unused to speaking for any extended period of time, and his inexperience makes it all the worse. His words spraddle out from him like the legs of some newborn creature before he can scoop them up and rearrange them with a cringing kind of self-consciousness that makes Percival’s teeth ache.

“Mr. Barebone - ” he interrupts, having had quite enough.

“It’s just that, if there’s any way, sir, that I could make myself useful to you,” Barebone finishes.

Ah, Percival thinks. There at last is that uncomfortable little tug in his gut. The reason he wishes Mancini would stay far away from this room and this person.

He has never been attracted to anyone for altruistic reasons. He knows exactly what it is that this boy brings out of him.

“I’ll think on it,” he promises, and then he taps the rim of his mug and raps the edge of the table with his knuckles, pretending that Barebone has jumped because of the sudden movement of the hummingbird on the pillow, or the fact that the window has now returned to its reflection of the street outside, in actuality a thirty yard drop from here.

He makes a quick exit after that, and decides that he will not risk visiting again.


	3. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a long while. I hope you all are doing well and are healthy and safe. Apologies for the intervals between updates. Life is wild, but an end to the wait in this chapter. Please let me know if you enjoy!

JANUARY EVENINGS WORKING LATE. Winter descends on the city. At once, the streets are cold and wet, damp trash on slushy pavement, great slabs of ice floating upriver, wing-tip sliding out on the walk to the apparition point after dawn. An accident between two taxicabs grips the no-maj newspapers. Ten dead. He’s barely through the door when he thinks of Barebone. Cholera in Russia. The coffee is sour this morning. Percival hasn’t seen the boy in weeks, since the afternoon in his little room at the Diversorium. He takes off his coat. He crumples his no-maj newspaper for kindling before he sits. He wonders what Barebone eats for breakfast, if he has anything at all.

According to his docket, the boy is getting on with the theoretical element of his studies well enough. He writes, he reads, he commits to memory - all with skill. Now that he’s put on weight, his examiner notes, he’s shown an aptitude for rote memorization and a surprisingly philosophical turn of mind, vestige of an upbringing steeped in no-maj religious discourse. That might have been promising, except that his practical work continues to disappoint so drastically that the team they’d assembled to try and teach him has shrunk from five persons to a single, withered instructor who claims to have got on quite well with Percival’s great-uncle Horus in the wand permit department back in ’82.

Talk in the department has long since shifted from fascination to derision, but Percival hesitates to cancel the project and cut their young prisoner loose. There is the concern, after all, of what exactly they are going to do with him after that.

Agitated by this thought, Percival scans the second report in the green folder. It’s neatly typed. Goldstein’s even gone to the trouble of binding the thing, ripe with the sour fruits of her research in the congressional library.

His stomach flips restlessly as he reads: _The historical precedence for these kinds of anomalies was execution. _This is logical, he reasons with his nausea. Uncontrollable magic poses the greatest threat to secrecy. That is the truth. There have been studies, peer-reviewed, published in annuals. _Threats were eliminated. _That was the 18th century. _Three recent cases after public sentiment had shifted_, the traumas of the 1600s fading, a slough of pamphlets from progressive thinkers urging _toleration_ \- _1810 in the Ohio River Valley, ’45 in Rochester, ’96 Seattle. Life imprisonment, _a commuted capital sentence more aptly titled “imprisonment to the death”; _all perished within the span of a decade_, _young_. Percival thinks again of Barebone in his little room with the green and gold blanket and sighs.

Noon has long passed by the time he sets down his papers to remove the vape-o from his pocket. Cold light filters through the enchanted window to his back; he waves his hand impatiently. The curtains screech across the rail, casting his desk in shadow. The darkness lends his every move the air of a secret, and it helps his headache. He leans hard against the back of his chair, dropping his head into his palms to rub his temples.

In a moment, he’ll send for coffee. His lunch. Work is blessedly dull. Like cough draught. Syrupy slow, easy to swallow. The office is warm, sleepy-quiet. Only the Barebone issue requires handling with any amount of nuance.

He inhales sharply, flooding his throat and his lungs with heavy vapour, raspberry flavour. He coughs; a complete mistake. He should never have strayed from coffee or rum. A drink would be nice. He never drinks on the job, has never done. Fools drink on the job. Imbeciles, paper pushers. He’s too important not to be in command of his full faculties. All the same, he thinks that he should get up and pour himself - but there are personal standards, which, as head of the department, he is bound to uphold, and then - idiocy! Just one drink, and then - and then, and then, and then, and then, and then.

He goes for the drink. Swirls his finger over the amber film where liquid meets air, watches the lamplight dance around the little waves his fingertips make along the surface. Theseus chooses this moment to push his face over the grate opposite Percival’s desk, his furrowed brow and freckled cheeks disturbing the lively little fire there.

“We had an appointment,” he says, frowning as Percival sets down his glass too hard against the desk. “I didn’t think you’d forget so quickly. It was only last Tuesday.”

“The connection looks good,” Percival says lamely to cover for his surprise. He watches Theseus’s lips flicker over a smouldering log, pale pink and hot orange, a darting tongue of smoke between his white teeth as he assembles his response.

“Promotional perks, as it were.”

“Ah,” says Percival with relief at having something to grasp onto. “So, you did get it. It’s well deserved.”

“It pays my bills,” says Theseus. “I’m very happy.”

“You look it,” lies Percival quickly. He thinks to himself that Theseus looks exhausted, his eyes ringed by dark circles like two smudges of smoke framed by papery skin, a scattering of freckles. To make the lie less obviously a lie, he smiles.

His mouth, unused to this form of gesture, feels like rubber.

“I’ve been thinking about the boy from your letter,” says Theseus’s voice from somewhere truly far off.

Summoning the decanter back into the palm of his hand to pour another finger of rum into his glass, he nods, but he is only half-listening. He wonders what Theseus would do with Barebone, in his place. Unimaginable. Theseus’s country has no such laws separating magical from non-magical people on the minutest of levels. Credence Barebone could have lived happily as a squib to a ripe old age had he been fortunate enough to have been offloaded on some dock in East London, instead of in New York City.

He wishes he had remembered this meeting in time to call it off.

“I’m going to tell you all about it,” he says instead, and then he does.

Talking about it to Theseus is comforting, he thinks. Talking about anything to Theseus usually is, but this especially so. When Theseus interjects a pause so that he can withdraw a length of parchment from a drawer on his desk to take notes, Percival’s relief is immediate. His headache recedes. He watches Theseus’s wavy reddish hair flicker over the grate as he leans back in his chair, hand under his chin as Percival knows it must be, the way Theseus always reclines when he is listening carefully.

“ - blasted the shit out of my office,” he hears himself saying around a mouthful of rum.

Across from him and through the flames, Theseus leans back onto his heels, the scratching of his quill like clockwork. In France, he’d relied on hastily scrawled copies of Percival’s notes when he could, swore that note taking had been his brother’s speciality.

_What’s yours?_ Percival had asked.

“Tell me what you’re writing down,” Percival says. “I want to make sure you’re getting it right.’”

“No, I shan’t,” says Theseus. “But do continue.”

That was the day before Theseus lost half his leg to a shell flinging his own body on top of the no-maj boy from Cardiff who had been standing beside him, who had been worried because his mother had taken ill at home and there would be no one left to feed the family cat. The foot that grew back was off by half a size, Percival remembers. The Ministry owed him new shoes. That had been one of Theseus’s jokes when they gave him his medal instead.

He finishes the rest of the story, sans candy, sans Mancini, and settles in for a long, compensatory draught off the end of his vape-o.

“Frightful mess, by the sound of it,” Theseus frowns. “And he hasn’t shown any sign of magic since?”

“Not a peep. Not so much as a whimper.”

He shakes his head, his mind returning in flashes to Barebone, another boy with an unwell mother. He wonders idly if they should get him a cat, something to take care of, a project. They have exhausted themselves of all the other methods of teaching magic, from the traditional guidelines laid out by Ilvermorny School to the obscure works of an old Hungarian tutor in Queens who had instructed them to allow Barebone to write out his own personal Charter and Bill of Rights in permanent ink to make him emotionally ready. That had gone over about as well anyone could expect.

Percival’s prior exhaustion returns to him in a deluge, a great deal of pressure behind his eyes.

He sighs, “It _is_ a mess, isn’t it?”

“More than - it’s a very sad story, I’d say.”

“It is that, too. But I’m not a newspaper man, Theo. I can’t do business in sad stories.”

The kindling crackles and splits in two as Theseus meets his eye around a haze of orange flame. Steady as ever. Utterly illegible. He doesn’t speak until Percival has slowed to a stop before the grate, and then he frowns a great deal after that, until Percival is bursting with the urge to prod him to respond.

Finally, he says slowly, “What you would really like is for me to tell you what I would do, having never been under the constraint of your rather backwards laws.”

That chafes. Theseus must know it does, because the corner of his lip upturns itself just so around the barb, as though to cushion its impact.

“You see things differently,” Percival concedes. Loathe as he is to admit it, the English ministry have long managed to maintain their no-maj relations without any of the kinds of hiccups that have plagued their American counterparts of late. He sighs, “I’m hampered by a lot of a nasty historical precedent here, which is telling me I should have him put down for the sake of peace and continuity. And then by my own conscience - ”

“ - which tells you that he is a human being,” Theseus finishes for him, “and that he has a right to his own life.”

“Yes,” Percival agrees. “That’s about the gist of it.”

“But you can’t make any use of him, because he won’t learn, or can’t.”

“Well, if you could cut out the part that makes me sound like a tycoon, I’d say you’re fairly on the money.”

“You _are_ a tycoon, old sport.”

“And you are a shining credit to the customs of your country,” says Percival around the silver tube in his mouth.

“I won’t ask you to explain that,” Theseus says lightly. He almost interrupts, almost prods, _I wish you would_. But Theseus is smiling, the air a fraction less tense than it had been when he’d first popped his head into the fireplace to find Percival alone with his drink. He does not prod.

“Give him a job,” Theseus continues. “If it were my brother, I would give him a job. Mind you, he’s a bit of a rotter, that one, what. Already burnt that bridge here, despite best efforts,” Theseus sighs. “But they’re of a similar age, aren’t they?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Percival lies.

“From what you’ve told me about him, he’d likely jump at a chance to be useful to you, wouldn’t he?”

“He’s said as much,” says Percival. He knocks back the last of his drink to wash out the discomfort from this memory.

“So, you find out if he’s got any manual skills. He feels useful, and you keep him busy and tidily under your nose while you work out your next move.”

“Sounds like a plan I might have put together myself.”

It might be the effect of the firelight on his face, for a moment Theseus’s smile slips. The flames sputter and it returns. He wipes a bit of soot from his cheek and seems to shrug, his head bobbing over the grate. “I rather had to put my tycoon cap on for that one,” he says, gives a little wink as dry as his tone. “And now I’m taking it back off. I’ve got a meeting in five. I’d hug you, if I wasn’t worried of singing my new suit.”

From somewhere in the office, Percival becomes aware of Mancini’s off-key singing. The lunch hour is over. His stomach lurches uncomfortably as Theseus pull back to brush imaginary coal dust from his lapel.

“A red-tie custom, anyway, and not very English,” he shrugs, which earns him a long look from the half of the head still being broadcast through his fireplace. Tart red vapour floods his mouth before his brain registers the act of withdrawing the vape-o from his breast pocket. Scowling, he pulls the cloying fog out through his nose. “Fruit was a failed experiment,” he says before Theseus can respond. “I let their new salesgirl talk me into it. Supposed to be healthier for you, somehow. I think I’d rather die sooner.”

“I say, sometimes I think you really would, Perce.”

“Well,” says Percival, freshly placated and dropping the vape-o back into his breast pocket.

Something passes between them through the heat-hazy image of Theseus’s face, his wide, black pupils which he hides by ducking his head into the brazier.

“I can meet again this time next week,” says Theseus softly. “Please take care to remember it.”

After the fact. Greenwich village’s mascot circles the air on the framed map of the city in Percival’s office, a crude pun of a smiling green witch on a broom. Three days pass coldly, wetly. The witch waves cheerily as he paces. Worse than the gloomy weather, she never fails to put him in a bad mood. Her good cheer grates. Her presence strikes him as needlessly childish. He has to wonder who put her there in the first place. He does not enjoy puns. In fact, he would get rid of the map entirely, if it weren’t for the red-tiled roof of the Diversorium beneath her broom’s tail, where Barebone’s name furls out like a flag across the sky in Percival’s elaborate Spencerian script.

Like his handwriting, Percival ’s reputation has been carefully cultivated over the years. He prides himself on his French silk suits, his impeccably oiled hair, his clean fingernails, his razor wit, and the fact that no one would ever consider him the type of man to go looking hard after advice. Theseus’s suggestion that he offer Barebone a job has gone unheeded. It nags at him anyway. He watches the name Credence Barebone circle the inch or so of page above the building in thoughtful silence.

There are many reasons why he shouldn’t give Credence Barebone a job. By name alone, the boy ought to be disqualified. The sheer foolishness of bringing a committed scourer into the headquarters for Magical Security, the department responsible for overseeing the discretion and wellbeing of an entire nation of wizards and witches - they would kick Percival out of office. They would be screaming for his blood, his own aurors head of the line. Except, maybe, for Goldstein, his brain corrects him reflexively; not Goldstein, and possibly not Mancini, although with Mancini the issue is different. With Mancini, there is something else he has to worry about, something he doesn’t want to worry about, because he cannot look into the blank cringing face of this scourer boy and find anything but a pair of eyes and a nose and a mouth, a simple human face, a liability and a responsibility, but nothing else. He cannot be attracted to Credence Barebone. He cannot give him a job.

As though he can sense Percival’s internal unrest, Theseus waits until the fourth day to drop a note through the Floo. Percival scans it quickly with his quill in hand -

\- _cannot write much - brother en route new york - by ship - please don’t arrest him - catch up soon -_

he scratches out his own monosyllabic response - _clear - _and sends it back the way it had come before falling into his chair to think.

The thinking lasts him through lunch, which he does not eat, and then through a meeting with Seraphina and the director of the Department for Health and the Containment of Magical Maladies, who wants more investigation done on the gas main leaks that have been blasting no-maj New York to smithereens around happy hour each night. Now a playground utilised by a home for magical orphans on the Lower East Side has been turned into a heap of scrap metal. Now they must intervene, he understands, now there are the lives of children on the line, _our _children, Director. Children he himself has taken from non-magical families. Does he really understand? Does he see? ’This is now our jurisdiction’ is a phrase he has come to despise from the thin lips of this joyless man. He is too busy thinking to be annoyed this time. He thinks while he scrawls notes into a little book - _Dawlish, Zhao and Assadourian to take up patrols _\- and then as he drops the book into his pocket, collects his coat and his scarf, bids his farewell of a tight-lipped Seraphina, and steps out through the circulating doors of the Woolworth and into the apathetic bustle of City Hall Park beyond.

Barebone answers the door on the second knock with a murmured, “Director Graves, I wasn’t expecting - ” 

“I won’t be needing any coffee this time,” says Percival in what he hopes is a gesture of generosity as he crosses the threshold, a kind of olive branch for the flushed boy still hovering beneath the lintel separating his hallway from his living space, now occupied by the bulk of Percival’s newly-tailored Chesterfield coat.

“I was just doing laundry, sir.” His hand sweeps an uneasy arc, alerting Percival to the clothesline strung up across the ceiling bearing a striped cotton sheet, a white shirt, metal tubs on the floor before the bed clamped together between a wringer. The room: cluttered.

The wringer: its rubber tubes like two lips pursed disapprovingly over the better half of a black trouser leg caught between its maws. Barebone crosses to stand directly in front of it, as though to hide it with his weedy body.

Fretful: “I didn’t know to expect anyone.” Overtaken again by the bent-backed cellblock hunch, wrung hands beneath the faint drip of his striped sheet from the ceiling overhead. He looks so unlike his own youth that it makes Percival almost sorry for him, and just as suddenly and wildly sorry for his final dig at Theseus, that childish cut about red-tie habits.

_I won’t stay long,_ he almost promises. But the words are shy, clump together in his throat, and come out crookedly as: “There’s a charm for laundry, you know.”

The sheet dripping from overhead. Barebone is wearing his old suit, Percival notices, threadworn cotton cord, already cheap and on the verge of unfashionable whenever it was churned out from the bowels of some downtown no-maj sweatshop the century prior. He decides immediately that he will never get past the suit. Its faded black cord with careful little darns in black thread at the elbows, the collar, the breast. The chain-stitched hems. Awful piping that is caught somewhere between schoolboy and bellhop, ostentatious as it is in its poverty, cotton in winter, the crumpled body within.

“Actually, Mr. Graves, I do know - ” Another instinct overrides, wiping all traces of shyness from Barebone’s narrow frame like a wash of lithotine, until only a ghost image of the hunched boy from Percival’s office remains imprinted on the way he holds his shoulders still a bit stiff, a little high.

Percival blinks. “I’m surprised no one’s done it for you then. Mancini or Goldstein - ”

“I asked Mr. Mancini to let me do it like this,” says Barebone, excruciatingly polite.‘Like this’ he rolls the wringer lever until it spits the trouser leg back out into the tub of rinse water, where he begins to churn it in tight little thrusts with the rubber end of a plunger. His every move is so tensely calculated, Percival can feel his own jaw clenching from the effort of watching him. It all feels a little performative, he decides, some scripted bit meant to incite his pity, no doubt. It’s all so very _homestead_, so wholesome and simple and poor. The careful churning of the plunger in Barebone’s hands (very clean, Percival notes with reluctant approval, fingernails neatly trimmed), the greying shirtsleeves tugged up his pale wrists flashing silver admonitors, the dark trousers in the galvanised tub like a blot of ink, not so much as a drop of water or a soap bubble displaced.

He should simply get on with his task and tell the boy to report to duty the next morning, as he’d planned. Instead, he says, “I can wait until you’ve finished. I have plenty of time,” in a tone which must be too soft, because Barebone either ignores or doesn’t catch its irony but nods, flushed still, and continues to twist the plunger into his rinsed trousers until they are a curl of black fabric beneath the surface of the water.

Percival watches as he draws them back through the wringer, as he stoops, shaking the wrinkles out, pinning them to the line above his dark head. His hair is fashioned in the same blunt, clumsy alchemist’s style as before. Does him no favours, Percival thinks. From this distance, he notes the way it tapers off at the nape of Barebone’s neck, thick and black just above a silvery scar half-concealed by his starched shirt collar, a souvenir of some past rendezvous with the kitchen scissors, no doubt. Something about that exhausts him. And then, more exhausting still, he remembers - _I asked Mr. Mancini to ‘let’ me do it like this_.

“It’s a lot more work that way,” he says, by way of filling the silence.

“I prefer it.”

The new jacket is up now. He watches the pale hands shaking it out, flattening the lapel, pushing it under the water and holding it down with the plunger before pausing to cut another flake of soap from a block.

“Better just to brush a suit out,” says Percival.

For a while as the plunger is worked through the water, the water into a turbid storm around the limp scrap of jacket, it seems as though Barebone is going to ignore him. He runs the jacket through the wringer twice, groaning each time with the effort of pulling it through before it goes back into the tub of rinse water.

Percival remembers his nanny with the tubs like these, back in the days of Young Percy, when for a time, it had been the fashion in the haughtiest old money New England families to educate their youth in the art of no-maj practicality. To his great misfortune, he’d felt then, it was nanny’s task to oversee his laundering and tinkering, to judge the miserable job he’d done trimming the hedges in the rear garden and guide his hand around the inner lip of a great pot with the soap and scrubbing brush.

“I have to wash them,” says Barebone around a burst of water from the wringer. His voice falters, but the words are mechanical, soulless, clearly learned by rote: “Those who wash their clothes are clean and happy.”

“Well, that sounds like something out of a Willy Wizard primary reader.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“And I don’t know what it is you’re quoting at me,” says Percival evenly.

His point lands. He watches the hesitation tug Barebone’s lower lip into a jagged, red line.

“It’s the Bible.”

“Ah,” says Percival. “Can’t say I’ve read it myself, but I hear the plot’s nice and twisty.” 

The look this comment earns him is utterly illegible, a blank mask of black eyes over a sharp nose, a little scrap of mouth concealing teeth, muscle, a bone skull.

“Well, it’s not _The Goat_,” says Barebone.

The wringer, a tube squeaking. Percival resists the urge to lubricate it with a voiceless charm as its operator turns his back to pin the jacket sleeve-by-sleeve to the line. From where he’s standing, he can see Barebone’s cheeks flushed pink behind the starched collar of his shirt.

“Which ‘goat' would that be, then? The one with the Book you won’t sign, or the Keaton picture?” When Barebone stops and only gapes at him, he shrugs. “He’s a little too good of a stuntman, wouldn’t you agree? We’d had reports, had to do a little intel, make sure he wasn’t one of ours.”

“Is he?”

“Not that I am aware of.”

Again the churning, the thin back to him, the sharpness of it that makes him want to wince.

“It’s the only one I’ve ever seen,” says Barebone.

“Did you like it?”

“I don’t know,” says Barebone. “That’s the kind of thing that would get me in a lot of trouble at home. Asking myself a question like that.”

February. A frigid, miserable winter with no end in sight. Percival begins to take his coffee with Mancini and Goldstein in his office. A ritual spawned by the malfunctioning of the pretzel cart downstairs. He requests Goldstein’s sister especially to bring them their tray. She’s pleasant and dazzling like a no-maj picture show actress and knows when and when not to make chitchat. She is a welcome relief from the oppressive silence of Barebone, who has taken up in the department a form of employ to which no single job description applies.

At some point he becomes aware, perhaps through Mancini who knows all the gossip, that the others have taken to calling Barebone the ‘office elf’. He isn’t much fond of that term, tasteless and middle class as it is. Around the same time, he notices that Barebone will cringe away into a bow when others pass, calls them all “sir” and “miss”, and eats the same cold ham sandwich in a locked stall in the lavatory on his own at noon. Percival’s head throbs often. He makes no fuss over ‘office elf’ but adds another ten minutes to the kid’s lunch, telling no one.

“You were meaning well,” Mancini says one morning, unsolicited, just as Percival is settling into his first cup of coffee and a freshly-loaded rum-flavoured vape-o.

“Pardon?”

“I said, you meant well, but you never should have brought him in here.”

He realises they are discussing Barebone but also not Barebone. And that Mancini’s feet are on the edge of his desk.

“They make him a joke,” says Mancini. “Now they call him the ‘Memo Mouse’, because he scurries off when anybody comes close.”

“He’s lived through worse than that. I’m sure he’ll survive.”

“That’s the problem with you,” says Mancini, his tone surprisingly hard, bitter. He takes the vape-o that Percival has offered. He does not remove his feet from the desk. “All of you. You think that it’s enough just to survive.”

It’s a colder winter than average, darker, with less sunlight filtering in through the grey clouds overhead. No-maj New York is tired of the cold. They write articles on it incessantly, next to the articles on funny explosions, a sudden preponderance of gas main leaks, inexplicable bus crashes, trees felled in Central Park. They are as stumped as Percival, infuriatingly. They are as afraid as the growing murmur of wizarding voices, there is uproar in Europe. And these days, even the days are short, as though the weather too has realised the futility in trying.

Of Barebone he hears the same unimaginative giggles, the cruel nicknames, the smallness of his own staff which he has neither the energy nor the will nor the courage, if he is being frank with himself, to confront.

Only mornings still half-asleep in his bed, safe within the steamy charmed subtropics of his apartment, beneath the cool of a linen sheet, he lets himself dwell on the matter of Credence Barebone. These moments carry all the bliss and secrecy of those early moments at home, sometime between the epoch of Young Percy and the establishment of Percival, Graves only to his schoolmates, and otherwise just a body and a pair of fumbling hands back when summers were one long hot sweaty embrace in the rolling grasses down the hill from his parents’ second house in Casco Bay. Sometimes he lets himself fall into the dream, his eyelids fluttering beneath the warmth of the sunlight, the sweet smell off the sea, the cushion of long grass beneath his back. After, he bathes himself, trims his nails, and dresses for the day. He bids farewell to his housekeeper, draws on his overcoat, and makes his way meticulously to the office, the name Credence Barebone as far from his mind as Iceland or Timbuktu.

This blithe ignorance can only last so long, however. By lunchtime, Percival is swamped in a mass of what he now calls ‘ordinary work’, memos from foreign dignitaries, self-combusting notes from his moles in DC, a mountain of very boring immigration paperwork, a petition from the Auror’s union for double pay on holidays, which he tosses to Mancini with a firm shake of his head. Credence Barebone has been set to polishing the automatic typewriters with a toothbrush and a little tin of Soil-Gone Household Oil. Percival follows with his eyes as he drifts from one desk to the next.

“Who gave him that?” he asks Mancini over the latter’s lunch.

“You didn’t even look at this petition.”

A rustling of paper. The ache behind Percival’s eyes could do with another dosing of coffee. He reaches for the vape-o in his breastpocket.

“You have to look at it,” Mancini says, and his hair is so well-coiffed today, his unseasonable linen suit so green and neatly tailored that it makes Percival want to say no on principal, or instate a staff dress code. He waves his hand and smokes his vape-o to clear the smog of Mancini’s voice and something about a ‘union contract’ and mandatory whatever-they-call-it that he is certainly not, not ever, going to sign off on. Through the door of his office, he can see Barebone hunched over a desk with the toothbrush and the tin of polish and a tuft of hair standing straight up on the back of his head where he’d run his smudged fingers through it, a nervous habit.

“If you look just here,” Mancini says, jabbing a handsome finger onto a line of black scrawl where something union-y must have been written, if Percival were to look closely. “Look just here, there is a law to protect collectivisation -”

He watches Goldstein approach Barebone with a wax paper parcel. He eats ham, Percival knows, because the offcuts can be had cheaply from Wannemaker, the parchment maker in Union Square. Most wizards will not touch a parchment pig, consider it bad luck. Goldstein, who does not even eat pork, brings the little parcels wrapped in brown paper and string, makes the stop extra on her way downtown just for Barebone, who she calls Credence.

“You cannot just ignore me,” Mancini filters indignantly through the cloud of rum vapour.

“I am not ignoring you,” says Percival. Through the office door, he watches Barebone’s pale hand take the parcel containing his lunch and tuck it carefully into his jacket pocket.

He is peripherally aware of Mancini swinging around, following his gaze. “He’s not working hard enough for you? Why do you stare at him when I am talking to you?”

“I am not staring,” says Percival.

“You are not doing much of anything,” says Mancini. “And for that the union will sue you.”

“I am wondering why you have interested yourself specifically in the matter of Credence Barebone’s bed linens,” says Percival suddenly. He does not know why he says it, but once the words are out of his mouth, he can do nothing but wait for a response.

“I like bed linens,” says Mancini. His indifference, his focus on the union docket in his well-tailored lap are too studied and give him away. “I like to be friends with people who have no friends,” he adds. “He had no friends, a shitty bed. _Ecco là, _two things I can do to make better the day of someone who has not known that life is good.”

What else do you do, Percival wants to ask, to make better the day of someone who has not known that life is good? He feels eager in a way that is unacceptable, and Mancini reacts as though he can read this thought. Maybe he can, through the slip between Percival’s frown and his own studied indifference. He shrugs as he drops the union docket back on to the top of the ‘ordinary’ work pile on Percival’s desk, his linen suit shifting like a wave of seagrass across the taut lines of his body.

“For some people it is enough just to have friends,” he says mildly. He hides his face from Percival by staring back into the office, where Barebone is still polishing, still the office elf or the memo mouse or the whatever he is now in the casually cruel imaginations of Percival’s hand-picked aurors.

“For you.”

“For me, if I do not want to lose my _bello_ husband. For many people, also. For Tina Goldstein. For _caro_ _Credino_.”

Now, upon hearing it stated for him, Percival remembers the matter of Mancini’s husband. The wedding invitation he had ignored in the hands of his housekeeper on a Sunday morning over breakfast, the just set it over there on the sideboard then, Mrs. Kews, would you? And the never remembering to pick it up again or respond after. But that had been years ago, much closer to the beginning of their working relationship than now, and he takes comfort from the fact that it would be in poor form for Mancini to hold a grudge or expect an apology. He rubs his temple, where the afternoon’s migraine has faded into an unusually benign ache. Credence Barebone, out in his office with the ham sandwich in his pocket, scrubbing bits of machinery that are technically spelled to clean themselves, merely has friends. The ominous little storm cloud in the pit of his belly crackles, rolls thunder.

Over lunch, he attempts to muddle through the union paperwork as a sign of goodwill to Mancini. He listens patiently as Goldstein explains the religious rulings on pork, the methods by which she has subverted these so that she might continue to be friendly and useful to _caro_ _Credino_. None of it is interesting, but he listens anyway. A light has descended on the department, not on Percival perhaps but on Barebone with his grease-streaked hands and his stick-up hair and the lump of brown paper in his pocket.

He finds that he cannot drink in enough information and interrogates Mancini, who tells him to befriend the kid himself, and Goldstein, who begs off to complete a pile of forms stacked on the edge of her desk. He reads the original files - twice. They are too depressing. The last thing that he wants to think about is Credence Barebone in the paws of that scourer woman. At the same time, this newfound proximity to the scourers is fascinating, darkly exciting. Like rolling down the grassy hill behind the Maine house in the arms of the cook’s son Andrew, while his ageing nanny called out for him through the window to come in for high tea.

Mornings in his humid room beneath the sheets. Always the same dreams, the house in Maine with red-cladding and seagrass rippling in the wind the way the tablecloth would settle down over the lawn for a picnic, the ruddy hands of his nanny who would pass on before he’d finished his training as an auror. The musky sea wind, heavy with salt, the way that his clothes would smell after of the sea and the pale strand where he’d lie on his own beneath the sweeping breeze from the heat of the afternoon until evening. That had been his favourite method for avoiding chores, avoiding his father or nanny. She’d been demanding of him and entirely unsentimental. But that, he reminds himself, was the vogue in those days, when parenting in great houses had been grounded in the philosophy that what all children really needed was a good dousing with cold water and a firm smack around the ears to teach them about life’s hard knocks. One could expect a great many things out of life, Percival’s father had been fond of saying. Fairness was not one of them. Therefore were they rich while others were not.

Sometimes he lies in bed with the conflict of these two visions of adolescence tangled up in the pit of his stomach. If he goes for the first, he lies in longer than he would normally allow himself before jumping up for a quick and invigorating cold bath. He does not allow himself to wallow in the second. He never has, but he thinks then often of Credence Barebone and the laundry and the old suit and the ill-fitting new one, which he now recognises as one of Tina Goldstein’s. He thinks about that more than he would like, which is to say, a lot.

He thinks about Theseus, too. Theseus in France, when they were both a little younger, unencumbered by their current posts, their responsibilities. At some point after the injury, Theseus had met him in Paris, offered to ‘foot’ them a round,grimaced at his own sad joke, and dragged them off down an alley to a bar he apparently knew well where he’d had a tab open for a fortnight.

There were things they had to discuss that Percival did not want to discuss. They took a table in the back, a rickety little thing, dark wood, scuffed. He had not wanted to sit down here. He knew that Theseus was planning on cutting him off, had sensed it. He had assumed that he would be better prepared mentally and emotionally. He felt sick. He had assumed that there would be a clean break.

If that wasn’t the case, Percival had hoped that Theseus might make it ugly and thus simpler for the both of them to navigate. He did not. He was, in fact, obnoxiously kind.

He was unable to stay on longer in Paris. Now that he was a war hero, Percival understood - he did not understand - now that Theseus was Theseus Scamander, Order of Merlin, pride of his family -

There were expectations of men in his position, primarily marriage, family, children. Wizarding society may have mixed with the non-magical in England, but it wasn’t like New York, it wasn’t like Berlin. And Percival understood that, didn’t he? He did not.

Surely he must understand. He could not. He could never.

But you understand your own laws, Theseus said. And you have no trouble reconciling yourself with them.

He’d had nothing to say to that. Nothing good, nothing that wouldn’t launch a fight Percival was realising he did not want. After, they drank until Theseus was sick in a potted plant and they wandered down to the no-magic district on the very outskirts of Paris, where poverty ringed the glimmering city like a trench. Theseus had to stop to take off his boot. They were standing in the middle of an unpaved lane, mud on their trouser legs. It was very cold, for summer. The wind whipping across the side of his face felt to Percival like a slap, rendered Theseus a dark blur. He said, I’ll be all right to go in a minute. It’s this bloody foot, Perce. Feels like a bloody elephant’s standing on it, but they said it’s impossible. It’s all grown back. The pain is in my head.

This morning, the dream of Theseus mixes itself with the dream of the Maine house and of Credence Barebone. Sometimes that house had been racked by summer gales, and the sea had risen up then, was no longer his cradle or his shelter. When he could not hide from them, he would be forced to take high tea with Father and the Mater, to be served not by nanny but by her sweet-natured niece, who would become to him Mrs. Kews, whose wedding he had not ignored, who had sprung for the job with him when he moved to the city and away from the stifling atmosphere of that house, and the high tea and the strand and the gales that tore it to shreds.

The dream begins with Theseus as he’d been Theseus in Paris, just after the war. Still pale, drinking absinthe on the picnic blanket on the back lawn, in the garden. Percival tries to remember, once he’s woken. He thinks that he and Theseus must have been discussing themselves, their careers, their hopes for the future. He thinks that he remembers the relentless heat of the sun on their bare backs. Credence Barebone pinning laundry to the line in the shade of the oak. Theseus: You should see what your father has done to his hands. Not his father, Percival remembers. Theseus’ face red the way that all those bloodless white English bodies turned red against the chalk after it was blasted to bits. He thinks that he remembers eating candy. They ate candy and they watched Barebone hanging his laundry. They watched as he was called into the house. You should see what your father does. You should look at his hands. He had followed into the house. He had gone alone. He remembers the long, cool stretch of the hall, Barebone’s back a shadow at the end, his parents’ in the formal dining room for high tea, the delicate sound of china on china. You understand your own laws, Theseus had said. And you have no trouble reconciling yourself with them.

But that was not the dream, those words. Unsettled, he gets up out of bed, takes a cold shower. He does not eat breakfast. It’s earlier than usual, and Mrs. Kews has not yet arrived. He apparates to work almost as soon as his feet have cleared the threshold of his front door.

Between the two of them, Percival thinks, it is he who stands out more against the casual backdrop of this deli, with his overcoat, his wool suit, his polished shoes. Barebone, hunched in the new suit from Tina Goldstein and his pinched-toe boots, is not a perfect match but less of a contrast. He has a particular skill for seeming to take up no space at all, defying the physics of his own body, as though it were made up of a kind of negative matter which makes him as easy to ignore as the soda pop bubbling in glasses between them, or the dog-eared paper menus on their laps.

“We have forty-five minutes,” Percival reminds him. “Should we start with a salad?”

He orders the salads while Barebone stares into the table. Coffee, cream. Do they have rum? They do not. Across the table, a little twitch. He orders them both pastrami on rye, pickles. It’s been years since he’s eaten here. This had been his escape from the world of his parents, as far downtown as he had been allowed to venture, all this brick and steel and straw-strewn street a world away from the leafy vegetation that surrounded half of their brownstone on Park Avenue. He tries to convey this odd nostalgia to Barebone, but it comes across inadvertently snobbish and out of touch. Better to stick to the topics of the day, Percival thinks, as he bites into his lunch.

“I came here with Mr. Mancini once,” Barebone admits, before cutting off a corner of his own sandwich with knife and fork and staring at it.

“Great pals now, are you?”

“He says that I should call him Dante, or Danny. That everyone does.”

“Nobody does that,” Percival replies. His own sandwich is dry, too meaty. He takes a sip of sodapop and grimaces. “I shouldn’t be rude," he says. "He’s a fine auror, and he’s decent. I’m sure it must be good for you to have a friend in all this.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I mean, it must be helpful to have somebody to talk to,” Percival tries again. “In all of this.”

“It is,” Barebone says hesitantly. “I’m not sure it’s my place to talk about it, Director Graves, but it’s been very good of Mr. Mancini to help me, since he’s - well, since he’s had the same experience of being new and without family here, in your society. When he was a boy.”

“I can imagine,” says Percival, as though this were not news to him. He wrestles briefly with his own forehead for control of his eyebrows before taking another sip of sodapop.

“For a little while,” says Barebone, “I had the awful feeling that you were going to lock me up forever. But Tina says that’s something that you would never do.”

“Of course not,” says Percival, a little too quickly. “Of course we wouldn’t do that. We’re a civilised society, Mr. Barebone. We have laws.”

“I’ve been reading some of them,” Barebone says. He takes a bite of the sandwich on the edge of his fork and sets it back down. Something about the gesture is charming to Percival, the nervousness of it.

“And what do you think of them?”

“I think - ” A sip of sodapop through the paper straw. Meticulous. The too-short sleeve of Goldstein’s suit jacket, the pale wrist, silver bracelets. “I think that they don’t seem too different from home.”

“Well,” says Percival, “that must be of some comfort to you.”

Around them, the deli is winding down in time with the lunch shift and return to work. He thinks that he recognises the face of a woman from accounting and nods in her direction. Barebone is still staring at the meat on his fork. His face is as pale and bloodless white as French chalk, trench chalk, apart from his lips, which are almost too red. He pushes the plate away before daring to meet Percival’s eyes with his own black ones.

“Actually, Director Graves, I think it’s a little unfortunate. It doesn’t really comfort me at all.”

“Oh,” says Percival, and then he turns back to his coffee and says nothing for a long while after. 

When they have sat through as much silence as either can tolerate, Percival pays the bill, brushing away Barebone’s fumbling into his jacket pocket with a noncommittal grunt. He lets the waitress pack their uneaten sandwiches into brown paper to be stuffed into the same pockets until they bulge ridiculously. On this he makes no snide comment, as he would with Mancini. His head is spinning. He finds that everything Barebone does, from his uncomfortable habits of poverty and abuse to his uncomfortable opinions on the most uncomfortable facets of American Wizarding law utterly refreshing and sweet. He holds the door open for them on their way, ushering Barebone’s hunched body onto the street. He makes no comment either, though he sorely wants to, on his companion’s lack of a coat.

“So,” he says.

He cannot help but reach out to touch the base of the black-clad back, where the suit hangs a little too loose, too long, fitted as it is to Goldstein’s height. He feels it stiffen beneath his fingertips, applies a little pressure, and lets go.

“You ought to straighten up a little, you know, with your height,” he says.

Barebone says nothing. He continues to stare ahead at the street corner which will lead them both back to the Woolworth, where the traffic lamp has turned yellow. Does he hate all of this? Wish he hadn’t come? Surely Percival has ruined it by dragging in the law, the poor posture. There is something hostile in the sharp set to his jaw that makes Percival second-guess his initial assumptions about where this might lead, eventually. Then it flickers, just as suddenly as the light turns red, and is gone.

“It’s very cold, sir,” says Barebone, and indeed the tip of his nose is red. He draws his hands up under his armpits, hunching even further.

“We ought to get back to work,” Percival agrees.

The walk back is longer, colder, more depressing than the walk there had been, when he was still confident in his ability to charm. Like a funeral procession, he leads them both back down in the elevator to the brass-plate on the department door, where Barebone’s reflection wobbles back all jaw and sharp cheek and serious eyes and mouth. Inside, all is still quiet. It’s ten minutes until the end of lunch for most, and the others he has sent on patrol. He thinks mournfully of the empty coffee pot on his desk.

“I’ll just be in my office,” he tells Barebone. There’s nothing for either of them to do, yet. He might sort through some of his paperwork, or sit and stare bitterly at the little green witch on the map on his wall, the likelier option. “You can join me if you’d like,” he says. To his surprise, Barebone nods obligingly.

“If it’s all right, sir, I’ll hang up my jacket.”

“Oh, certainly,” says Percival. “Fine, fine.”

He doesn’t bother to find out if the department is equipped with any kind of coat hanging apparatus, having long forgotten what it was like to work at one of the open desks beyond his office door. What will they do in the office, together, anyway? Almost as soon as he sits down at his desk, he regrets it. Too formal, he thinks. But then Barebone crosses in from the outside, and he hears himself give an order to shut the door without knowing quite why. He likes the way that Barebone jumps to do this. He does not like that he likes it.

He says, “Pull up a chair, why don’t you.” And then he says, “I’ve some books on the law, if you’re interested.”

Here we are, he thinks to himself, just two men sitting in an office, reading. He picks up one of the dockets on his desk for good measure as Barebone cracks open a great leather-bound tomb of court records at his side. It is perfectly normal, he thinks. His head throbs predictably. It is the afternoon, after all. He has to quash the unexpected and deeply undesirable urge to tell Barebone about his migraines, and the Maine house, and that one summer when he ought to have been making hay with the cook’s son Andrew on the strand and the dragon pox that swept through instead and left him pain at the cost of evading death.

“That’s a very boring book,” he says.

“Truthfully, sir, I haven’t read many books to know the difference.”

“Well,” he replies, “all I’m saying is, it’s hardly _The Goat_.”

No response. Maybe the shadow of a smile, as Barebone continues to stare into the book on his lap. His eyes are moving too quickly to be reading, or even scanning. Percival watches from the corner of his eye as the breath catches in his thin chest. He is so intent on watching this that he almost misses the dart of Barebone's hand through the space between them. He feels the warmth of it on his lap and blinks, but Barebone is still staring at the book as though he had not just placed his palm perfectly still on Percival’s thigh, as though he were not holding it there. Waiting.

The charm for locking the door is one he can and has and does perform wordlessly, a little wave of his own hand before he slides it over Barebone’s, pats, locks their fingers. He hears a sharp intake of breath, the only sign from Barebone that they have touched and are touching. His eyes are still on the book. It would be easy then for either one of them to stand up and stride out of the office and end this. Percival half expects it. They could pretend quite easily that nothing happened. He could have Barebone reassigned downstairs to the wand permit department, as simple as scrawling out a memo on self-combustible parchment.

Barebone takes his hand and guides it onto his own crotch where Percival can feel the hardness of his penis beneath his trouser leg. His grip is light, as though he expects Percival to wrench away at any moment and welcomes it. His eyes settle on the door.

“It’s locked,” Percival tells him, and he nods. His hand retreats, leaving Percival’s to undo the buttons restraining his erection. He is still watching the door. Is he as nervous as Percival? Nothing in his face betrays any kind of emotion, whether he is enjoying this, what he is hoping to achieve. He places the book back onto the desktop. On impulse, Percival grips his thin wrist with his free hand and presses it into the wood veneer, flat into the desk, pinning him there.

Now Barebone looks at him. He lets Percival hold him there, open his trousers and grasp his penis in the cup of his palm. His eyes are pure black, wide. Without saying anything, he slides his hips forward across the chair. He doesn’t wince at what must be the friction of his own dryness against Percival’s palm. He ducks his head and spits. It doesn’t take much until he is rigid in his chair, his pale face flushed with blood, nearly as red as his lips, which he presses between his teeth as though to contain the sound of his own pleasure.

Then, without saying a word, Barebone tugs his hand free of Percival’s grip on the desk, stands, and walks out through the office door, which springs open to admit his passage. Percival wonders if he should follow. The sound of the department door swinging on its hinge does not seem to mark a body leaving so much as the coming in of the others. He stands and straightens himself, hesitating, before lifting his hand to his face. It is still wet from Barebone’s spit. He wipes it on his handkerchief and tosses it onto the desk, frowning.

Maybe Barebone had planned this, is making his escape. Percival has never fooled himself into thinking that the silver bracelets on his wrist are anything but a mimicry of control on the part of the government. He should follow, just to be sure, but he sits down at his desk again instead, feeling as winded as though he had just run through sand. Maybe he is afraid of what he has done. Has he done it before? Maybe he has. Maybe this is all he wanted and he feels too awkward to explain.

For a while, Percival works his way through these reasons as he files through the dockets on the nearest pile, his head throbbing. The office door is still locked, excepting its brief allowance for Barebone. He can hear the rattle of Mancini on the other end and a muffled curse when he is denied entry. His head feels like it’s been run through the rubber tubes of the clothes’ wringer, and he is tempted to call in the rest of the day and go back home, lie in bed with his eyes closed and a block of ice on his forehead. The office is bustling again when he steps out in his overcoat. He pretends to ignore Barebone’s little twitch, the brief eye contact before he ducks back over the nearest typewriter with his toothbrush and his tin. Not escaped, then. Just back to work, as though nothing had happened.

Percival orders Mancini to call him if anything comes up. He feels exhausted. He leaves Tina Goldstein in charge of filing his brief for the day.

“Don’t bother me with anything small,” he warns her, and then he walks out through the department door, out of the elevator, into the street, and apparates home.


End file.
